More Fishy Stories

As a follow up to a previous blog entry on the state of Tuna fish in our oceans, Science magazine has an article outlining new quantitative data on the state of fish populations. The number of species continues to dwindle as human consumption increases and deep water extraction techniques are employed to remove slow-growing and reproducing species.

In 5 of 10 well-studied ecosystems, the average exploitation rate has recently declined and is now at or below the rate predicted to achieve maximum sustainable yield for seven systems. Yet 63% of assessed fish stocks worldwide still require rebuilding, and even lower exploitation rates are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species.

Although, the numbers appear grim and political action remains sluggish as usual, there is more news and discussion of this tragedy of the commons in the leading print papers. The Washington Post has an article titled, "Unpopular, Unfamiliar Fish Species Suffer From Become Seafood." It reveals how the marketing people, seeing coastal populations of cod, red snapper, and other popular species decline (if not collapse) decided to start selling fish that were once considered unpalatable by rebranding the fishes name. Ocean fish once known as slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, and Patagonian toothfish have been recast with "tasty" sounding monikers. The slimehead, for example, has been transformed into the "Orange Roughy" and as a result seen its population decimated.

That fishermen have turned to them shows what's left in the ocean. Today's seafood is often yesterday's trash fish and monsters..."People never thought they would be eaten," said Jennifer Jacquet, a biologist at the University of British Columbia. "And as we fish out the world's oceans, we're coming across these species and wondering, 'Can we give them a makeover?' "

It is now obvious that regardless of what is done a large and potentially catastrophic loss of ocean fairing species will be lost. The Science article does give the slight hope that with more reasonable minds and practices, "About half of the depleted species might actually have a chance to recover, the scientists found, if given enough protection."

US and Israel: Strange Days

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS) the United States has provided approximately $3 billion in grants annually to the state of Israel or roughly one-fifth of the annual foreign aid budget. Overall, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since WWII. Israel is mandated to use 75% of its military aid from the U.S. to buy materiel from American based companies; a convenient form of corporate-socialism. In addition, Israel, a nation that has the per capita income equal to that of South Korea, receives favorable treatment and special benefits under U.S. assistance programs that may not be available to any other nations.

With such generosity, one would then expect that this client state would be as accommodating to the wishes of its Imperial master as possible. In today's Ha'aretz, protesters including one Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, the head of the Nir yeshiva in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, are stated as saying that Barack Obama is "a Racist" and "If he continues with his actions, he will bring about the disintegration of the American superpower."

The speeches were accompanied by jeers from the protesters at every mention of U.S. special envoy George Mitchell, who is currently in the region in a bid to reach a deal on settlement construction.

Opinion polls conducted within America and Israel point to a historical divergence in thinking. It was found that 79% of American Jews consider Obama pro-Israeli, while only a paltry 6% of Israeli Jews did. In Israel, disenchantment with Obama cuts across political parties, demographics, and social groups. In a poll conducted in mid-June on Americans perceptions of Israel, it was found that only 44% thought the U.S. should support Israel; down from 71% a year ago. Less than half of those surveyed considered themselves supporters of Israel; also down from over two-thirds before the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

A recently published Pew Global Attitudes survey of 25-nations found that the image of the U.S. had skyrocketed with the election of Barack Obama as president. The study determined that the, "Median level of confidence in the U.S. president among the 21 countries surveyed in both 2008 and 2009 shifted from just 17% for Bush in 2008 to 71% for Obama in 2009."

We have arrived at a very strange intersection. George W. Bush, the most loathed American president in the history of the American republic and perhaps the planet, had great support in Israel throughout his miserable reign of incompetence. While Barrack Obama on the other hand, a man who is adored across the world is uniformly loathed in Israel. With Arab states lining up behind Obama, the GCC formalizing a single currency and becoming a single economic union, Iraq a de facto American colony, and Iran in political and societal free-fall, one has to wonder if perhaps those billions in Israeli aid would be better served and appreciated elsewhere?

More lies about Housing from the MSM

Today's headlines posited that, "New house sales in the US jumped by 11 per cent in June, providing some of the strongest evidence yet that the market has bottomed out after being savaged for three years."

Yeah! I was so over this recession, I could use a new house or two! But wait...

Floyd Norris at the NY Times looks at the numbers and tells a different story.

Somehow a headline that says “sales fall 21 percent from year-ago levels” would not sound the same as the headlines that are now running ... To put it another way, this was the second-worst June since they began counting new-home sales in 1963. It was not quite as bad as June 1982, when the country was mired in a deep recession and interest rates were sky high. Then 34,000 new homes were sold.

Norris elaborates: "There are twice as many households in America as there were then, so relative to population this was the worst June ever, by far."

Another attempt to inflate confidence in the market, where none should exist. While things are somewhat less worst than six months ago, the fundamentals remain the same with respect to national unemployment, individual debt, rising health care costs, and declining manufacturing across the USA. When the MSM and economists conspire to sell fables about the recovery, it only encourages the same short-sighted entities that originally created this mess to pursue the same infernal objectives.

Chinese Democracy: Happiness through Slavery

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/671645

Much continues to be said about the Great Chinese economic 'Miracle'. Wondrous growth, unprecedented wealth production, and terrific everyday savings for you Walmart shoppers!

The primary reason that I believe that China is incapable of becoming a world power, much less a force for international stability, is it's inability to address internal criticism and the extreme levels of corruption that have manifested itself throughout the Communist Party and virtually all state apparati. An example of this behavior is illustrated in the above linked Toronto Star article. Jiang Weiping, a former Chinese journalist, served five years incarceration for the following:

Jiang published – in a Hong Kong magazine in 1999 – an expose of high-level corruption: The deputy mayor of a city had used state funds to buy cars and apartments for his 29 mistresses. Another from another city had gambled away $3 million from state funds at the casinos of Macau. A powerful provincial governor, Bo Xilai, the son of an even more powerful party elder, was covering up corruption among cronies.

Whilst we in the West are certainly not immune to criminality and public corruption, as this blog amply illustrates, the standard authoritarian model of jailing dissidents and punishing those who embarrass the ruling criminal junta, belies not a growing and tolerant state, but a petulant and unstable regime that needs to extinguish all criticism in order to persist. Despite what we are constantly told by propagandists on both sides of the Pacific, these are hardly the attributes of a flourishing and benevolent state.

Tuna: you can almost taste the extinction in each bite!

Tuna fish, (not to be confused with actual “chicken” or ‘chicken of the sea’ as in Jessica Simpson’s case) is one of the great marvels of the oceans. It is considered one of the most evolved fish in the world. Bluefin tuna, for example, can reach speeds of up to 88 km per hour. Along with Mako sharks and Great Whites, the bluefin tuna are homoeotherms; animals that are capable of internally regulating their body temperatures. They are capable of elevating their body temperatures by as much as 25 degrees above the water they swim in, thus making them particularly effective as predators. Bluefin Tuna can migrate across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, then turn around and do it again.

The bluefin tuna, and to a lesser extent, the yellowfin, are among the most sought-after of big-game fishes. Tuna is the most popular food fish in the world. It is eaten raw, cooked, in sandwiches, in salads, and in cat food. The total worldwide tuna harvest is four million tons. Commercial over fishing, almost exclusively to feed the insatiable Japanese sashimi market, has endangered all populations of bluefin tuna.

The WWF (not the wrestlers you idiot) are predicting that Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna will be extinct by 2012. They have stated that, "The population of tunas that are capable of reproducing – fish aged 4 years or over and weighing more than 35kg – is being wiped out." Ransom Myers, a marine biologist from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has pointed out the fact that industrial fishing took no more than 10-15 years to virtually liquidate and imperil any new fish community it encountered to a tenth of its previous size. "From giant blue marlin to mighty bluefin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean”. In fact, scientists predict that the collapse of all ocean fish stocks by 2048.

In a 2003, Dr. Myers published an article in the journal Nature and stated,

Most people also don't know how bad it is for us to be eating so much fish, not only because of the destruction of an ecosystem vital to survival but also because the big predatory fish are full of the toxins and other pollutants that we cast into the oceans. It's not as healthy to eat fish as most people believe.

Due to the ferocious demand for bluefin tuna from Japan where bluefin tuna are considered a delicacy and are used in sushi and sashimi, overfishing is posed to drive the species into extinction. The Economist magazine has an article stating that Monaco, with support from European allies France and Britain, along with the USA are pushing forward in 2010 to have an international ban on the sale of bluefin tuna.

As Prince Albert, Monaco’s ruler, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, “The forces of selfishness and stupidity that wiped out the great whales and the northern cod in the last century are steaming ahead at full speed... The bluefin tuna is as endangered as the giant panda and the white rhino.”

Once the oceans have been systematically deprived of life and ecosystem after ecosystem begins to fail, terrestrial environs will also collapse and human civilization too will cease due to our own greed.

France falls out of love with topless sunbathing | World news | The Guardian

France falls out of love with topless sunbathing World news The Guardian


Sacre bleu! C'est terrible!

I've officially cancelled my trip to the French Riveria this year and all following years unless this travesty is rectified.

Historical feminist writing details how the row over toplessness was a struggle for women to do what they liked with their bodies. What has been projected on to it today are different values, identified, not with equality but desire, sexualisation of the body, voluptuousness and the body perfect.

It's less about women feeling at ease and free. It has been linked to the harsh cult of the body beautiful, where no imperfection is tolerated.

Will these feminists make up their bloody minds!

First they were shouting, "pants down and tits out." Now they've aligned themselves with the religious right in demanding everyone cover up!

Banks and bonuses: Going overboard | The Economist

Banks and bonuses: Going overboard The Economist

Shared via AddThis

Goldman Sachs' (see my associated commentary on the company in the post below) "shareholders received $4.4 billion of profits during the first half of this year while staff were allocated $11.4 billion in pay and bonuses, equivalent to about half of the firm’s net revenues."

The article asks, who is really in charge of these so-called investment banks? Is it the shareholders or the employees? Goldman counters that they have to pay top dollar for their talent. As discussed in the previous two posts, where there is a compensation misalignment, profit will be made through deception, fraud, and criminal enterprise. The dominant philosophy of unbridled greed that has become the mantra of Wall Street bankers over the past two decades has not stopped and it continues to be as pervasive as ever.

The article questions:

Banks pay low dividends, and when they get into trouble the capital that shareholders have retained in the firm typically gets wiped out. Employees have taken money out of their firms each year. It may be time for the owners of banks to mutiny over the bounty.

In other words, the public always gets soaked and institutional investors get shafted, but the big-boys at Goldman Sachs smirk as they dream of yet another weekend at the Hamptons paid through casino-capitalism.

Everybody hates Goldman Sachs

“Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same” - Goldman Sachs CFO

One fine afternoon last October, George W. Bush, in a scene for the history books, tilted over the large oak table in the White House and said to Hank Paulson, "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker is going to go down." The public was told in no uncertain terms that if the American public didn't agree to saving the reptilian army of bankers that had brought about this disaster, that we would all go down with the Titanic. The deal was made, the money transferred, and like children waiting for Santa, the public expected that the banks would begin lending and the economy would right itself. It didn't happen. Instead Goldman Sachs hoarded the cash in their vaults and then disgorged themselves of their nimiety by giving their staff the largest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year. The company is believed to have paid 973 bankers $1m or more in 2008, while this year's payouts are on track to be the highest for most of the bank's 28,000 staff.

What we now know is that "sucker" as Dubya put it at the time wasn't the US economy or the American public, but rather Goldman Sachs and the pirates of high-capitalism. Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone magazine, states that the public was hoodwinked to make a, "Political decision in the middle of an economic crisis to use the state as a crutch to prop up exactly one sector of the economy, and we chose exactly the wrong people."

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, explains that,

Goldman's high-risk business model hasn't changed one bit from what it was before the implosion of Wall Street. Goldman is still wagering its capital and fueling giant bets with lots of borrowed money. While its rivals have pared back risks, Goldman has increased them. And its renewed success at this old game will only encourage other big banks to go back into it...

[That] Goldman has reverted to its old ways in the market suggests it has every reason to believe it can revert to its old ways in politics, should its market strategies backfire once again -- leaving the rest of us once again to pick up the pieces.

Paul Krugman further elaborates that what has been done is not in the public interest and in fact, has created the groundwork for an even greater economic catastrophe in the near future because,

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

Max Keiser, broadcaster, former broker, and options trader, has the harshest and absolute best words I've seen or read in regards to Goldman Sachs,

They are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague. They should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/max-keiser-goldman-sachs-are-scum

Would Goldman Sachs still be pulling in record profits if the government didn't bailout AIG, which at the time owed Goldman nearly $20 Billion, or given the fact that the FED gave them another $10 Billion through the TARP program and undefined additional millions (billions?) from other government programs, when the company converted itself to a bank holding company? The latter number is impossible to determine, because Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have refused to disclose this information to the public; the very people who made the loan to these bankrupt bankers and greedheads!

What does this say about the American government or for that matter, Hank Paulson who was then secretary of commerce and former CEO of Goldman Sachs? Clearly, the primary objective of both the Democrats and the Republicans wasn't in getting Americans back to work, but instead in saving their wealthy donors/friends in high places. The banking industry and Goldman Sachs have gamed the system and the entire Bush and Obama administrations are part of this orchestrated fraud. Goldman Sachs has made fools of every tax paying American and are laughing all the way to the...

Hooker with a Penis: The Great Scam of China

Week-after-week, the mandarins of high economics have sought refuge from the capricious whims of the Gods of Finance by issuing glowing anodynes that predict that the Great Chinese Juggernaut remains healthy, virile, and still emergent. The World Bank has decided that due to the expansionary fiscal and monetary policies employed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), that their economy will grow 7.2% in GDP for 2009. OECD predicts a growth rate of 7.5% and Goldman Sachs chimes in with a rate of 8.3% (rather than the 6% previously expected) in 2009. Economist Lu Ting, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, states that growth could reach a grossly improbable 9% in Q3 and 10% in Q4.

I’ve already outlined in a previous post a number of the obvious discrepancies with existing economic data relating to this current recession and a few of the underlying structures of world finance (where credit markets remain frozen), which indicate that all is neither well nor necessarily improving. Besides the pedestrian kowtowing that is a requisite employment condition for all elite banking economists, is the fact that financial institutions across the world have an incentive to deceive. Whether it is Jack Grubman at Salomon Brothers (Citigroup) hyping garbage IPO’s to clients, mutual fund scandals arising from crooked brokerage houses, insurance scandals (that included Marsh & McLennan and AIG), the pervasive and wide-reaching executive option scandals, weekend at Bernie Madhoff’s, or the perennial excesses of the investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs), the underlying trend is that deceit remains profitable; as long as one isn’t caught.

Taxpayers across the industrialized world have become virtual vassals of these super-national entities that have become “to-big-to-fail” (TBTF). Your tax dollars, Euros, and Yen have been extracted to prop up the extravagancies of casino-capitalism and the perfidy of the greatest criminal minds of our generation. To generate their windfall profits, whether it is through socialized corporate-welfare schemes or through general deceit, these corporations require that investors believe that their input will result in individualized profit. As a truism, few invest to lose. Hence, specific social and economic conditions must be advocated to prod and cajole reluctant investors that they need to be separated from their money. This psychological determinant is why bankers, economists, and governments rarely state the truth. Without “hype” and the continual selling point that profits are just lurking around the corner and they alone have the inside-edge, people simply will not take the risk.

The numbers offered by the Chinese government and their acolytes have rarely been accurate. For example, a survey conducted in the final half of 1994, uncovered 70,000 fraudulent statistics, of which 20,000 involved "blatant falsification" of government reports. Zhu Zhixin, former head of the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), admitted in 2002 there were persistent discrepancies in their current growth numbers because, "Some [Chinese] regions intentionally make false reports." Few economists have made an attempt to reconcile published economic data with the distorting effects of a weak financial sector, acute pollution, rampant corruption, and their underground black economy. With the world economy still in a tailspin, a growing and unsubstantiated chorus of China experts has been selling us of the grand feats the PRC has been achieving in promoting global growth.

Let’s review a few numbers that aren’t in question: In 2008, 6.5-9.1 million migrants were laid off in coastal areas and industries. As of May, Chinese exports have fallen 25.2% year-over-year. The average Chinese family saves approximately 30% of its disposable income, “partly because China's social security net is weak; people have to rely on their own resources to pay for a hospital stay, for example, or for a child's education.” The average person in China has seen their confidence in the economy diminish and a resurgence of greater thrift. Perhaps the most significant economic data to emerge disputing current growth trends is the national 4% contraction in electricity consumption in the Q1 2009. Historically, electricity usage statistics have been a better proxy for GDP growth than the officially published government figures.

The communist regime has declared that as a result of the global recession, the nation is realizing a shift from an export-led to a domestic-consumption based model. The same people who cooed about being the manufacturing engine of the world, now want us to believe that they are moving the ‘miracle’ to another level and switching to a service based economy with its remaining manufacturing industries servicing their nouveau-rich middle class. Optimistic estimates of this transition have placed it at taking at least ten years to complete.

Therefore, what is not in dispute is that there are far more unemployed persons, most of which have been forced to return to rural enclaves; greater social instability is evident; further demands are being placed on the Beijing government to funnel reserve funds to prop up ailing and inefficient government owned or subsidized businesses; and environmental degradation and pollution continues. One can then infer that the economy, based on current patterns, is in a long-term decline commensurate with the rest of the globe. The growth rates being offered by the Chinese, investment bankers, and lackey organizations like the World Bank are completely bogus. If we take a contrarian’s perspective, I believe we are witnessing a serious decline in China as a potential world power and economic powerhouse. The ability of the Chinese to pull the rest of the world out of this prolonged economic malaise, to a great extent like Chinese economic data, is unsupported by facts.

Economics and The Great Recession

Economists across the world have been grinning from ear-to-ear saying the recession is nearly over, “we’ve past the worst,” and there are clear indicators of improvement. Arguments have been bandied about that tell the greedy and the absent minded that “green-shoots” are rising, the rate of job losses has declined, there are fewer surplus’ to be seen in manufacturing circles, and consumer sentiment has improved. While these arguments all have an element of truth, taken in context with actual events that have unfolded not merely in the past eighteen months but in the past two decades of globalization, a substantially different set of conclusions can be reached.

I’ve never trusted economists and their dismal science as a whole. One of the fundamental aspects of ‘real’ science, and not the statistical bloviations of financiers, is the concrete capacity to first, adequately explain a physical phenomenon and second, to accurately predict physical events before they occur based on the prior’s explanation. Let’s first review how they did leading up to this current recession:

1. Alan Greenspan former chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) and an adherent of Ayn Rand, in March 2007 said he saw only a one third chance that a recession could occur that same year. The US recession officially began December 2007.

2. Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, stated in July 2007, only months before the beginning of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression of 1929, he believed that despite a host of potential economic perils the US economy would pull through 2007 and into 2008 in relatively good shape. It did not.

3. Mark Perry, professor of economics at University of Michigan-Flint, stated in his popular economics weblog Carpe Diem in October 2007, “Economic variables identified by the NBER as the most important recessionary indicators… provide no support for the notion that the U.S. economy is headed for recession.” In fact he believed, “Most current economic indicators suggest a healthy economy, expanding at the average rate of an expansionary economy.” A year later stock markets across the planet crashed.

4. Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard and the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), stated in November 2007 in the NY Times that, “My judgment is that when we look back at December with the data released in 2008 we will conclude that the economy is not in recession now.”

5. April 2008, Alan Greenspan was given the opportunity to re-evaluate his previous stances and provided the eager public with another kernel of his vast sagacity in the belief that a decline in “U.S. home prices will probably end well before early [2009] as the number of houses on the market diminishes, aiding an economic rebound.” As of today, “US home prices fell 6.8 percent in April from a year earlier as rising unemployment and record foreclosures kept buyers out of the market.”

6. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard University economist and another Bush-bot adviser, recently stated in the NY Times, “It is fair to say that this crisis caught most economists flat-footed. In the eyes of some people, this forecasting failure is an indictment of the profession. But that is the wrong interpretation.” I’m sorry but this isn’t the Gong Show; you’re wrong again.

The above aren’t drama queen’s like Jim Cramer or for that matter anyone affiliated with CNBC. Rather, they supposedly are the best America has to offer in understanding economics and as such, were given pedestals in government and chairs in academia to pursue policies in the public interest. As the above summation reveals, none of them came close to accurately analyzing the existing trends or predicting the evolution of the current recession. If any person in ‘real’ science were to give such glaringly inaccurate and poor predictive analysis they would be fired and dismissed as dunces and crackpots.

In the past few months, the schemers, speculators, and accumulated greedheads, have been positing the argument that we are at the end of this so-called recession. Again, I think we need to re-evaluate the terms we are using. Richard Posner, a conservative jurist and author of a recently published book “A failure of capitalism,” has called this current situation a ‘depression’ due to,

The intensity of the anxiety that it has aroused, the enormous costs that the government has incurred to try to stop the downward spiral of the economy, the possibility that those costs will bite us as the economy begins to recover and by doing so will knock the recovery off its path, and the further possibility that the recovery will be extremely protracted because of long-term changes in consumer preference.

Let’s look at the outcome of the past six months for America:
1. The June 2009 US employment report shows that conditions in the labor market continue to be extremely weak, with job losses in June of over 460,000
2. Unemployment has risen from 7.2% to 9.5%
3. Underemployment rate has risen from 14.8% to 16.8%
4. Aggregate number of hours worked per week has dropped precipitously
5. There has been more than 6 Million jobs lost since the start of the crisis
6. The DJIA remains 42% below its 2007 peak of 14,200
7. Personal savings of those with jobs has risen to 6.9%

The UK, the Eurozone, Japan, and all emerging markets are in worst shape than the USA. The UK output is expected to decline by 4.3% in 2009. The ECB announced in June that it expected Eurozone GDP to decline by as much as 5.1 percent this year. Eastern Europe is still a brewing concern with its capacity to further undermine major Western European economies and financial sectors. Japan faces historic levels of unemployment and continuous month-to-month declines in exports. The numbers offered by the Chinese simply don’t add up and their vaunted domestic middle-class population is not in any position to become uber-consumers. Unlike previous recessions and regionalized meltdowns, the rancid fruit borne by the collusion of national governments and international finance industries now encumbers the entire globe and all industries.

Despite these obvious facts, the OECD has declared “green sprouts” are rearing, the worst is behind us all, and in 2010 the 30-country organization will see 0.7% growth. The IMF, as of yesterday, boosted its 2010 global growth forecast to 2.5 per cent. Ben Bernanke back in February assured congress that, “there is a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery.” Given the track record of these “experts,” does anyone really believe them?

Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists who got it right, has stated that the U.S. recession will last at least two years and could drag on as long as the one that plagued Japan in the 1990s. Joseph Stigiltz who has done an excellent job of analyzing the roots of this current calamity states the little spoken but obvious fact:

So the real risk, I think, is that things will be even worse [than] before the crisis. The reason I say that is the way that we have gone about rescuing the banks and restructuring our financial sector has resulted in the too-big-to-fail banks becoming even bigger.

The best argument I have discerned is that there will not be a sustained recovery or minmally a return to the previous norm! One has to consider the fact that we have seen a fundamental and systemic failure of capitalism across the globe and neither the American nor any other nation’s economy will simply revert to “business-as-usual.” For the past decade, the American consumer, who represents 70% of the US economy, was sopping up an inordinate level of consumables from China, Japan, and the rest of the world. They built it and the Yanks bought it. Now that has stopped.

Americans are losing their jobs at record levels, they are seeing whole domestic industries disintegrate with no chance of those jobs returning, health care costs are increasing, and the value of their homes are collapsing. US Housing prices as of April 2009, have witnessed an 18% year-over-year drop and a reduction of 32.6% from their peak three years ago (S&P/Case-Shiller index). Currently, ten percent of homeowners have mortgages that are valued more than their homes are actually worth. Foreclosures increased 18% in May 2009 and thus remain unabated. The US banking industry, on the other hand, has an additional $1.8-trillion exposure to commercial real estate and faces potential losses of approximately $200-billion. The implication is that commercial real estate, "Is headed for a crash that could eclipse even the devastating slump of the early 1990s." The American consumer has wisely started to save again; however, this new propensity towards frugality during a severe recession reduces the likelihood that a recovery will occur anytime soon or can be maintained.

Robert Reich states, “This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.” Therefore, the growth and consumption that occurred during the roaring nineties and the dismal decade of the zeroes will not be repeated. A new equilibrium will have to be established with diminished expectations, reduced (if any) growth rates, and an end to the culture of excess that has permeated government, business, and individual want.

As John Connor says in Terminator Salvation, "If we stay the course, we are dead! We are all dead!"

Chillout Session: They