Phase III – Stealth Is.

It’s realtime, click above (or goto costofwar.com) to see the running total.

Bookmark:

In February 2009, the head of U.S. intelligence – Dennis Blair – said that the global financial crisis was the largest threat to America’s national security. All of America’s intelligence agencies apparently agreed.

The same month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – Admiral Mullen – also agreed.

Now, Mullen is focusing on a specific economic threat. Specifically, Mullen is focusing on the debt:

The national debt is the single biggest threat to national security, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tax payers will be paying around $600 billion in interest on the national debt by 2012, the chairman told students and local leaders in Detroit.

“That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.

But at least war is good for the economy, right? At least spending on defense will help the economy recover and climb out of this pit of debt, no?

Actually, no.

Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that war can be very bad for the economy. For example, in 2003, Stiglitz wrote:

War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.

Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.

Stiglitz has said that this decade’s Iraq war has been very bad for the economy. See this, this and this.

And as the New Republic noted last year:

Conservative Harvard economist Robert Barro has argued that increased military spending during WWII actually depressed other parts of the economy.

Also from the right, Robert Higgs has done good work showing that military spending wasn’t the primary source of the recovery and that GDP growth during WWII has been “greatly exaggerated.”

And from the left, Larry Summers and Brad Delong argued back in 1988 that “five-sixths of the decline in output relative to the trend that occurred during the Depression had been made up before 1942.”
All of the spending on unnecessary wars adds up.

The U.S. is adding trillions to its debt burden to finance its multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.

Two top American economists – Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – show that the more indebted a country is, with a government debt/GDP ratio of 0.9, and external debt/GDP of 0.6 being critical thresholds, the more GDP growth drops materially.

Specifically, Reinhart and Rogoff write:

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies…

Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that deficits do matter.

A PhD economist told me:

War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy.

You know about America’s unemployment problem. You may have even heard that the U.S. may very well have suffered a permanent destruction of jobs.

But did you know that the defense employment sector is booming?

Also: Pentagon can’t account for $8.7 billion in Iraqi funds

Bookmark:

HR 875 Is Not About Food safety, It’s About Genocide of Agricultural
Biodiversity

One of the most potentially dangerous bills we’ve ever heard of is
trying to sneak its way through Congress right now, in the sheep’s clothing of so-called “modernization” of food safety. HR 875 (text of bill) is a bill put up by Monsanto and other monolithic corporations trying to seize totalitarian control over all agriculture. It was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, whose husband WORKS for Monsanto, and is ultimately about one thing, defining ONLY their own GMO products as “safe”.

What makes the bill so dangerous is that it is heavy on penalties including prison time, while at the same time being incredibly vague about what would actually trigger those sanctions.
HR 875 is nothing but a Trojan horse, with an invading army to be designated later, in
the form of an bureaucratic administrator (most likely a corporate lobbyist shill) with draconian LAW MAKING POWER to make up their own definitions so that all competitors are either driven into bankruptcy or locked up.
There are problems with food safety we can talk about, but HR 875 is not going to make us safer, any more than invading Iraq made us safer. It MUST be stopped.

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum959.php <—Don’t expect much from your cries for the Govt. to stop their megalithic plow towards Fascism in all directions.

Bookmark:

Did you know that President-elect Obama:

• voted for every one of President Bush’s Iraq-War funding increases?
• believes Bush’s “surge” in Iraq has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams” and has proclaimed his “absolute” belief in the “War on Terror”?
• criticized the Iraq War because it is “unwinnable,” not because it is illegal, immoral and has killed one million Iraqis?
• will probably leave 140,000 private contractors (mercenaries) and as many as 60,000 to 80,000 regular US troops in Iraq?
• praised President Bush, Sr., and the 1991 Gulf War saying: “I think that when you look back at his foreign policy, it was a wise foreign policy. In how we executed the Gulf War…. I think George H.W. Bush doesn’t get enough credit for…his foreign policy team and the way that he…prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That’s all it cost. It was extremely successful.”
• is willing to bomb Iran and that he won’t rule out a first strike nuclear attack?
• wants to send an additional 10,000 US troops to fight the war in Afghanistan?
• wants to expand the Afghan war with unilateral air strikes to bomb Pakistan?
• supported Israel’s war against Lebanon?
• supports Ballistic Missile Defense?
• favours military expenditures on warplanes that he says “provide the backbone of our ability to extend global power.”
• voted for the Patriot Act II, the Wall Street bailout, building a border wall with Mexico and immunity for corporations that conducted electronic eavesdropping on Americans?
• wants continued sanctions against Cuba?
• called President Chavez an “enemy of the US” and wants sanctions against Venezuela?

The idea that Obama is anti-war is a powerful myth that will impede the peace movement’s ability to mobilize opposition to the inevitable continuation of US militarism and imperialism. President Obama may then prove to be more of an obstacle to peace than a true agent of change moving the US economy away from a world in which corporations seek profit through predatory wars. Obama’s deceitful image as peacemonger will allow him to get away with policies and actions that would not be countenanced for an instant if they had come from the likes of McCain or Bush.  This blindspot for Obama’s pro-war agenda will not only hamper the ability of US peace activists to speak out, organize and protest, it will also help to dampen the efforts of many others around the world.

Under President Obama, the US military budget may well be spending about $2.3 billion a day. The 2008 US military budget is $696 billion. Obama says he will increase military spending and will add 65,000 troops to the Army and 27,000 Marines. Every increase of 1,000 army troops adds about $2 billion per year, while every addition of 1,000 Marines adds $1 billion/year. That means Obama’s proposal could add $157 billion, bringing the total to $857 billion per year, which means about $2.3 billion per day.

Bookmark:

Samurai Gangstas with Guns Vs. the secret elite…a model for all organizations seeking revolution….

Janked from http://www.savethemales.ca/
By Henry Makow Ph.D.

A Chinese secret society with 6 million members, including 1.8 million Asian gangsters and 100,000 professional assassins, have targeted Illuminati members if they proceed with world depopulation plans, according to Tokyo-based journalist Benjamin Fulford, 46.

They contacted Fulford, a Canadian expat, after he warned that the Illuminati plan to reduce the Asian population to just 500 million by means of race-specific biological weapons.

“The Illuminati, with the exception of Japan, is very much a white man’s game,” Fulford says.

The secret society confirmed Fulford’s information and asked for advice. He provided them with a list of 10,000 people associated with the Illuminati, mainly members of the Bilderberg, CFR and Skull and Bones. Neo Cons are also high priority targets.

“I have promised that not a single person will die if they negotiate in good faith,” Fulford says.

Fulford is the former Asian Pacific bureau chief for Forbes magazine. He quit in disgust when Forbes refused to run a damaging story about one of its advertisers. Fulford has since written 15 books in Japanese. His most recent is a scathing dissection of the 9-11 Hoax.

Fulford says Japan has been controlled in secret by the Illuminati through the use of murder and bribery. Underground sources tell him the Americans have murdered over 200 Japanese politicians and influential citizens since the end of WW2.

Among the victims are former Prime Ministers Tanaka, Takeshita, Ohira and Obuchi. They were all murdered using a special drug that induces strokes. The Illuminati have been warned that the Chinese secret society will not tolerate any more murders. It has also extended its protection to truth seekers in the West.

continue reading…

Bookmark: