“你準備好下一場危機沒有？”

“你準備好下一場危機沒有？”
"Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?"
By Paul Craig Roberts

Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.
證據表明美國是一個失敗的國家，正在擠成一團的速度快於我可記錄的。
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.
一個失敗國家的決定性標誌是，騙子在政府內部，利用政府去保護和促進他們的私人利益。
Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.
另一個決定性的特點是，收入不平等上升當內幕人仕操縱經濟政策，為致富而犧牲別人。
Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, “Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.
在美國收入不平等目前在全體國民是最極端的。 2008年經合組織的報告“收入分配與貧困在經合組織國家”，結論是美國有最高的不平等和貧困率橫跨整個經合組織，和自2000年以來沒有地方會有這樣一個嚴峻的收入不平等上升正如在美國。經合組織發現，在美國的財富分配更加不平等過收入分配。
On October 21, 2009, Business Week highlighted a new report from the United Nations Development Program concluded that the US ranked third among states with the worst income inequality. As number one and number two, Hong Kong and Singapore, are both essentially city states, not countries, the US actually has the shame of being the country with the most inequality in the distribution of income.

The stark increase in US income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of US jobs, which enriched executives with “performance bonuses” while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated OTC derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis.

Frontline’s October 21 broadcast, “The Warning,” documents how Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt blocked Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from performing her statutory duties and regulating OTC derivatives.

After the worst crisis in US financial history struck, just as Brooksley Born said it would, a disgraced Alan Greenspan was summoned out of retirement to explain to Congress his unequivocal assurances that no regulation of derivatives was necessary. Greenspan had even told Congress that regulation of derivatives would be harmful. A pathetic Greenspan had to admit that the free market ideology on which he had relied turned out to have a flaw.

Greenspan may have bet our country on his free market ideology, but does anyone believe that Rubin and Summers were doing anything other than protecting the enormous fraud-based profits that derivatives were bringing Wall Street? As Brooksley Born stressed, OTC derivatives are a “dark market.” There is no transparency. Regulators have no information on them and neither do purchasers.

Even after Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be bailed out, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers stuck to their guns. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers, and a roped-in gullible Arthur Levitt who now regrets that he was the banksters’ dupe, succeeded in manipulating a totally ignorant Congress into blocking the CFTC from doing its mandated job. Brooksley Born, prevented by the public’s elected representatives from protecting the public, resigned. Wall Street money simply shoved facts and honest regulators aside, guaranteeing government inaction and the financial crisis that hit in 2008 and continues to plague our economy today.

The financial insiders running the Treasury, White House, and Federal Reserve shifted to taxpayers the cost of the catastrophe that they had created. When the crisis hit, Henry Paulson, appointed by President Bush as Rubin’s replacement as the Goldman Sachs representative running the US Treasury, hyped fear to obtain from “our” representatives in Congress with no questions asked hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars (TARP money) to bail out Goldman Sachs and the other malefactors of unregulated derivatives.

When Goldman Sachs recently announced that it was paying massive six and seven figure bonuses to every employee, public outrage erupted. In defense of banksters, saved with the public’s money, paying themselves bonuses in excess of most people’s life-time earnings, Lord Griffiths, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, said that the public must learn to “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.”

In other words, “Let them eat cake.”

According to the UN report cited above, Great Britain has the 7th most unequal income distribution in the world. After the Goldman Sachs bonuses, the British will move up in distinction, perhaps rivaling Israel for the fourth spot in the hierarchy.

Despite the total insanity of unregulated derivatives, the high level of public anger, and Greenspan’s confession to Congress, still nothing has been done to regulate derivatives. One of Rubin’s Assistant Treasury Secretaries, Gary Gensler, has replaced Brooksley Born as head of the CFTC. Larry Summers is the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council. Former Federal Reserve official Timothy Geithner, a Paulson protege, runs the Obama Treasury. A Goldman Sachs vice president, Adam Storch, has been appointed the chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Banksters are still in charge.
Is there another country in which in full public view so few so blatantly use government for the enrichment of private interests, with a coterie of “free market” economists available to justify plunder on the grounds that “the market knows best”? A narco-state is bad enough. The US surpasses this horror with its financo-state.

As Brooksley Born says, if nothing is done “it’ll happen again.”

But nothing can be done. The crooks have the government.

Note: The OECD report shows that despite the Reagan tax rate reduction, the rate of increase in US income inequality declined during the Reagan years. During the mid-1990s the Gini coefficient (the measure of income inequality) actually fell. Beginning in 2000 with the New Economy (essentially financial fraud and offshoring of US jobs), the Gini coefficient shot up sharply.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

"Do you have enough food and supplies on hand?"
“你有足夠的食物和用品在手沒有？”
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2009/RobertsUSFailedState.html

報告：糧食價格已經開始飛漲
Report: Food Prices Already Starting to Skyrocket
Monday, 09 Aug 2010 10:17 AM

Experts warn that overall food-price inflation is inevitable, as Wal-Mart reportedly has already hiked prices amid a recent jump in wheat prices and the failure of the Russian harvest.
專家警告整體食品價格通漲是不可避免的，正如沃爾瑪據說已上調價格，正當最近小麥價格跳升和俄羅斯收割失敗。
The most immediate impact will be felt in the price of bread and bakery products but other food items which make use of grain will also rise, according to analysis from Verdict research. This includes some meat products where grain is used as animal feed.
最直接的影響將在麵包和糕點產品的價格感受到，但其它使用穀物的食品也隨之上升，據判決研究的分析。這包括一些肉類產品在那穀物被用作動物飼料。
Meanwhile, a recent JPMorgan survey of supermarket pricing in Virginia showed a 5.8 percent increase in average prices at Wal-Mart, which represents the most significant sequential increase since the inception of the study in January 2009, the Business Insider reported.

The survey compared a 31 item like-kind basket at a Wal-Mart Supercenter, Kroger, Safeway, Harris Teeter, and Whole Foods, the Business Insider reported.

Should wheat prices remain elevated for the next few months, shelf prices for many products could go up by 6.7 percent within a year, Verdict reported. Some items, such as croissants, could go up by as much as 11.1 percent.

While the failure of the Russian wheat harvest has caused a temporary spike in prices, these high prices won't last for long because of excess production in China and the United States. But global fundamentals are supportive of a long-term rise in the price of food, The U.K.'s Telegraph reported.

At the moment there are just fewer than 7 billion mouths to feed around the world. The United Nations believes there will be more than 9 billion people by 2050.

In fact, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization forecasts that total world demand for agricultural products will jump 60 percent between now and 2030, rising much more rapidly than the population.

This rapid increase is because the areas of the world where the population is rising the fastest are also the areas of the world that are moving out of poverty, the Telegraph reported.

Demand for grains in emerging markets increases more than the population because of one simple fact – richer people eat more meat. This increases demand for grain feeds for livestock over and above that used for human consumption.

Ironically, a wheat stockpile in India that could feed 210 million people for a year is starting to spoil because the government lacks enough warehouses to store it.

According to a government estimate obtained by The Associated Press, 17.8 million metric tons of wheat are exposed to the elements — stored outdoors, under tarps in India's pounding monsoon rains. The wheat could alleviate hunger in a nation where one in two children are malnourished.

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http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/Food-Prices-Skyrocket/2010/08/09/id/366979

極端氣候重創主要農業生產大國 糧食價格狂飆