Author: Alicia

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch has done a study of some effects of seven years of global QE — including 660 consecutive interest-rate cuts by the trans-Atlantic and Japanese central banks — and found that the entire policy helped Wall Street, while damaging the real economy. The surprising thing is that the bank put the findings out, in a report by its chief investment strategist.

Michael Hartnett says “the results represent a clear victory for Wall Street over Main Street. Zero rates and asset purchases of central banks have proved much more favorable to Wall Street, capitalists, shadow banks … than for workers, savers, banks and the jobs market.”

Some of the report’s findings about investment:

* For every job created in the U.S. this decade (since 2010), companies spent $296,000 buying back their stocks.

* “An investment of $100 in a portfolio of stocks and bonds since the Federal Reserve began quantitative easing would now be worth $205. Over the same seven years, a wage of $100 has risen to just $114,” or 1.5%/year.

* For every $100 of U.S. venture capital and private equity funds raised at the start of 2010, they are now raising $275; but for every $100 of U.S. mortgage credit extended five years ago, just $61 was extended this year.”

* “Commercial real estate [values] gained 168% compared to a 16% increase of all U.S. residential property.”

The US under Barack Obama is blatantly planning more provocations in the South China Sea like the one, last week, in which the destroyer USS Lassen sailed inside the 12 mile limit of territorial waters of an island over which China claims sovereignty. An unnamed U.S. defense official told Reuters yesterday that the US is planning to conduct two provocations in the South China Sea, about twice a quarter, “to remind China and other countries about U.S. rights under international law,” he said. “That’s the right amount to make it regular but not a constant poke in the eye. It meets the intent to regularly exercise our rights under international law and remind the Chinese and others about our view,” the official said.

Yi Xiaoguang, deputy chief of the general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, on Monday urged the US “not to do things that undermine the big picture of the China-US relationship” when asked about potential future US Navy actions in the South China Sea. Yi told China Daily that China “will take all the necessary measures to champion national sovereignty.” About the future relationship between the two militaries, Yi suggested that they first “establish strategic mutual trust, boost understanding, and prevent misunderstanding and misjudgment.” He said the two militaries are expected to “respect each other’s national sovereignty and security concerns” and “make a solemn commitment on not provoking or making trouble out of nothing.”

US Pacific Command commander Adm. Harry Harris attempted to defend the US’s provocative actions in the South China Sea as defense of the principle of freedom of navigation, during a visit to Beijing, yesterday and today, but was rebuffed by his hosts. Both Fan Changlong, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, and Fang Fenghui, chief of general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), protested the US action in their meetings with Harris, and warned that such provocations threaten China’s national security and the stability of the region.

“What has been unfolding lately is just like watching a self-orchestrated, self-directed, self-performed show,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying during a regular briefing on Tuesday. She estimated that 100,000 ships travel “safely and freely” through the South China Sea a year, including millions of barrels of oil per day. “They run into no problem at all,” she said.

As a further message, Chinese fighter jets, last weekend, flew training missions over the same area where the Lassen had passed through, according to an account in RT. The jets flew from an airstrip recently constructed on one of the islands in the region. Retired Chinese General Xu Guangyu commented, according to the South China Morning Post: “Both the defense ministry and foreign ministry have said China would have answers when its sea rights were breached. Such statements need to be followed by real actions. It’s a signal China sent to the US that it is serious about its claims. This is the minimum level of response China should have, or it will fail the expectation of its people.”

It wasn’t done by drones, but equally deadly economic and social policies carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations, under direct Wall Street orders, have led to a shocking, sharp increase in mortality rates among white, non-Hispanic Americans aged 45-54. That is the finding documented in a study issued in mid-September by two Princeton University economists, Anne Case and 2015 Nobel Economics Laureate Angus Deaton, which is now receiving widespread media attention nationally.

Case and Deaton further show that, if the mortality rate “had continued to decline at its previous (1979-1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999-2013.” That is a half-million unnecessary deaths that belong right on the doorstep of Obama and Bush, and their Wall Street policies.

These findings serve to underscore Lyndon LaRouche’s repeated insistence that Obama’s policies are leading to sharply increased death rates in the American
population. LaRouche today further commented: Why didn’t we, as a nation, years back, take action to stop this from happening? How did people get set up to accept the economic policies of destruction of science and industry, along with endless bailouts of Wall Street? How were we induced to submit, to do this to ourselves?

Action must be taken immediately, LaRouche continued, to remove Obama from the Presidency by Constitutional means. Otherwise the Satanic Obama will continue to kill through economic policies, kill with his drone attacks, kill with further illegal wars and the stream of desperate refugees they are producing, and kill with threatened thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and China. Obama is not some kind of genius, LaRouche stated; he’s just Satanic, and has people terrorized, including most of the Congress of the United States. But if you don’t stand up to Obama and change his policies, you are incompetent—and will soon be a dead bunny.

The Case and Deaton study documents that from 1999 to 2014—the Bush and Obama years—the mortality rate among white non-Hispanic Americans aged 45-54 rose by more than 10%; the poorer, less-educated stratum within this age cohort saw a 22% rise in their mortality rate. “This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States: no other rich country saw a similar turnaround,” the authors wrote. In fact, many countries (such as Germany and France) saw declines of 25% and 30% in mortality rates for the same age cohort during this same time period.

As shocking as the dramatic rise in the mortality rate as such, are its causes:

“This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis,”

the authors wrote, taking particular note of the skyrocketing use of opioid drugs and heroin among this age group. And they reached the following chilling conclusion:

“Those currently in midlife may be a ‘lost generation’ whose future is less bright than those who preceded them.”

This is a marker of a New Dark Age now sweeping the U.S. The headline on the Nov. 2 New York Times article covering this story was “Dying in Middle Age.” It
could well have been: “Dying in the Middle Ages.”

The rank and file of the Democratic Party organization in Manhattan are not yet moral corpses (although they do smell funny). LaRouche’s Manhattan Party intervened with the courage to uphold the truth, beckoning the New York Democratic Party towards an actual future WITHOUT Wall Street and Obama.

The venue in Chelsea was about half full, at 250 people, mostly boomer-aged party leftists, with an array of 40-something aged organizers directing much of the operation. The event began with the representatives of each of the three Democratic presidential campaigns answering questions posed by a moderator. Hillary’s representative was the County Chair of the party, a leading member of the Assembly and current Congressional candidate to replace Charlie Rangel.

From left to right, representatives of Clinton, O’Malley and Sanders’ campaigns, moderator far right.

During the initial phase, the moderator asked questions about “policy debates” in the Democratic party, attempting to find some difference between the candidates, but never touching seriously on the true matter—the increasing death rate of Americans, particularly their children, and the impending financial disaster. It was in this phase that our organizers first began to shape the event.

The Hillary representative lied brazenly in at least two cases about Hillary’s positions. He was asked about her financial “reform” policy, and stated, “She wants to go beyond Glass-Steagall,” without offering any indication of what that meant. The moderator asked for a clarification, “Does that mean she’s in favor of breaking up the big banks?” His response was a lying, “Yes I believe so.” At this point, we became vocal, calling him a liar, from our seats in the audience—”THAT”S NOT TRUE, SHE’S AGAINST IT!” Then, he lied a second time when asked point blank by the moderator if Hillary was in favor of a No-Fly-Zone in Syria. He said, “No” so we again agitated, from various corners in the audience, saying, “HE’S LYING AGAIN! THAT’S NOT TRUE!” The bald-faced liar was visibly destabilized, both in his recognition that people in general really did care about these two questions, and in finding himself called out publicly.

The effect of this was clear during the audience question period, which was lengthy. The overall tone of the questions was not at all satisfied by any candidate, demanding a real response to the cuts in Social Security announced, the plight of prisoners in the US, and most loudly, the Wall Street problem.

One of the first audience members to ask a question corrected the Assembly member on his lie about Hillary and the NFZ. Then, three different audience members unrelated to us exposed Hillary as a Wall Street candidate—the first by demanding to know what Hillary supports, if not G-S, and the other two by indicating disgust and indignation at her campaign contributions and speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, as well as general “drift toward the right.” Another audience member demanded a response on the death penalty—which the moderator declared, “Everyone in this room rejects,” only to be corrected by the O’Malley representative, who read a very recent direct quote from Hillary endorsing “a more careful” application of the death penalty. The Assembly member lamely attempted to discredit what was clearly a matter of public record!

The Assembly member was flummoxed by this angry anti-Wall Street, anti-Hillary, and mutedly anti-Obama sentiment alive in the crowd, but he really lost his cool when our activist asked, “What will your candidate do about the hospital-bombing, mass-murdering, drone-launching, ISIS-supporting, global bully, World War 3-instigating, Dictator-in-Chief Barack Obama!?” The Assembly member was the only one of the three who responded to this question, by starting off with bluster, “Remember who started this wars!…” To which our activists shouted from their seats, “YOU MEAN LIBYA? WHAT ABOUT 50 TROOPS IN SYRIA” He stumbled in his speech and eventually shut up after saying, “If you disagree with the President, that’s your opinion.”

Shortly after, we managed to get another question, asking, “In the past 48 hours we have had the conclusion of the Vienna meeting around cooperation to defeat terrorism. China offered to begin an immediate reconstruction policy for Syria. At just that moment, Obama announced a so-called ‘authorization’ of 50 US troops into Syria—an ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL MOVE that threatens World War Three with Russia, as these troops are very likely to come into conflict with Russian forces! What will you do!?”

The Sanders campaign urged restraint in military action in Syria, and specifically on arming rebels “when we don’t have any way to know who they are.” They agreed with the need for development, and acknowledged the refugee flows, but claimed there was a need to resolve the conflict first. Then they gave support to the Vienna meeting. The O’Malley campaign, which had earlier given the idea that US foreign policy should be about promoting a “global middle class,” and using “development and diplomacy as equal tools with military action,” made similar comments, calling it “a very important question.” The Assembly member lied again, and once more we called him out for lying.

LPAC Activist Jessica White.

Finally, at the end of the event, our teacher activist stood up, without being called on, and issued a “correction,” by instructing the campaigns and the crowd that we need Glass-Steagall and an end to QE so that we can direct credit towards infrastructure, schools, transportation, etc. The correction was—Glass-Steagall is NOT some issue to be discussed—it’s a LIVE bill in the Congress and must be enacted NOW.

The only significant contingent of truly young people in attendance demonstrated the global effect of China’s policy—they were a club of CUNY students who are organizing for the DREAM immigration act to be implemented. One in their group approached our organizer and praised the question on development versus WW3. The group of students were all Central American, and many of them were well aware of the Nicaraguan canal. “We know what China’s doing!”

What followed was an informal straw poll which seemed doctored for Hillary’s benefit, even though she did lose it. According to the tally reported, Hillary received 79 votes, Sanders 89, and O’Malley 54. But to our eyes, Hilary had fewer and O’Malley more. We approached the representatives of the Sanders and O’Malley campaigns and gave them the New Silk Road report as the ONLY true solution to the incredible global crisis, and briefed them on progress on Glass-Steagall and Obama’s wars. Activists distributed literature outside of the event, finding widespread disgust with Hillary and her representative.

Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin, reporting over the weekend from the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain, found that nobody shares the U.S. belief that Russia will eventually come around to the U.S. view on the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. argument, as put forward by Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, is that it’s only a matter of time before Moscow realizes that its military intervention and its ardent support for Assad’s continued rule are mistakes, after which the Russian government could support a political process that includes replacing Assad.

Rogin reports that after Blinken spoke, a series of officials and experts from the countries that are allied with the United States on the Syria issue openly disagreed with the contention there was any significant chance Russia would come around to the Western view on Assad’s future.

Even the British don’t buy the U.S. theory on Russia and Assad. “There’s a school of thought that says that as the Russians get drawn into this conflict, they will more and more look for a way to get a political solution,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, but “it’s not my government’s assessment.” Hammond told Rogin that the day before the Vienna meeting, last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told him Russia did not have any flexibility on the issue of Assad’s departure. Hammond said that the Russian position on Assad is exactly the same as it was three years ago and that it’s likely to remain the same.

François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, disputed Blinken’s contention that the Russians would change course under the cost pressure of their intervention. “I would be very surprised if Russia could not sustain such an effort despite its other difficulties until at least the end of the American electoral cycle in November of next year,” he said. In other words, Heisbourg expects the Russians to run out the clock on Obama’s administration.

Maxim Shepovalenko, a senior research fellow at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, said that Russian thinking is that the intervention might actually succeed and that Assad will stay in power. “We believe firmly that the Syrians will decide for themselves, and if this campaign is a success, Assad is definitely the one who will be preferable,” he said. 

A frantic French President François Hollande has stepped up his international lobbying aimed at securing a binding international climate change agreement out of the COP21 international conference which opens in Paris at the end of this month. Today, he lobbied Xi Jinping in Beijing; on November 10, it will be African heads of state in Malta; on Nov. 15 at the G20 summit in Turkey; then island nation heads of state; and, finally, on Nov. 27, he joins the Queen of England, her consort Prince Philip, and their nutcase son Prince Charles, in marshaling the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM-2015) summit in Malta, behind the climate change hoax to reduce the world’s population by six billions or more.

But as he set off on his foreign lobbying, his government’s firing of the most popular TV meteorologist in France because he bucked the COP21 climate change lies, became a cause célèbre back home. Philippe Verdier was suspended mid-month as chief meteorologist for the state-run France Télévisions, after he published a book, Climat Investigation, which rips apart the climate scare campaign, and accuses state-funded climate change scientists of being “manipulated” and “politicized.”

Verdier told RTL radio in October that he had put himself “in the path of COP21, which is a bulldozer, and this is the result.” He told another French journalist that he wrote the book, after being “horrified” when Hollande’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called a meeting of TV meteorologists to tell them to highlight climate change issues in their broadcasts.

Verdier escalated this past weekend, posting a brief online video, reporting that he had been banned from being on air since he published his book, Climat Investigation, and then silently opening, “in front of you, in the name of freedom of expression and information for us all,” the envelope containing the official notification that he had been “fired by France Télévisions one month before COP 21.”

A petition launched in defense of Verdier by France’s vigorous “climate skeptics” minority, already had 15,000 signatures by Nov. 1, including signatures of 10 parliamentarians, RTL radio reported. France’s scientific resistance to the great lie, including scientists working with the Schiller Institute against this genocidal hoax, call themselves the “climate optimists.” They are mobilizing, and they are getting some media coverage.

An inquiry carried out in the wake of Verdier’s suspension by the investigative website, Arretsurimages, discovered that at least half of France’s meteorologists agree with Verdier and the “optimist” scientists.

Climate “optimists” in the United States are seeing what they can mobilize to gum up the works for President Obama’s intention to use the Paris COP21 conference to finish off the U.S. economy. The November issue of the Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News newsletter cites proposals by attorney Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that U.S. Senate pass a Sense of Senate resolution before the Paris conference, stating that any agreement negotiated in Paris must be ratified by the Senate to take effect. “The all-important point is to ensure there is no reasonable claim that `the world’ could reasonably have believed the [obama] Administration was binding the U.S. to anything in Paris.” The resolution could be done with a vote by a simple majority.

The U.S. Labor Department reported Oct. 30 that its Index of Employment Costs — which hasn’t declined in 25 years except for the first, “crash” quarter of 2009 — dropped by 0.6% in the third quarter of this year. The Index, which includes wages and all retirement, pension, and health insurance benefit costs for employment of a given hour of labor, is still 2.1% higher than one year earlier. But all that increase and more was the increased company costs of health insurance plans (+3.3%) undera Obamacare. Wages, and all other benefits, fell in real terms over that year.

A Sept. 30 report on wages and poverty issued by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) shows that the wages side of this decline is still continuing.

The study, based on analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, found that since the end of 2009, when recession “ended” and Obama’s “recovery” began, real wages have declined for the majority of all employees in the United States.

For all American workers, the median real weekly wage is down by 4% during this “Obama recovery.” But for those in lower-wage occupations, the loss of income has been greater. For cooks, it is down 8.9%; for food preparation workers, down 7.7%; for personal care and home health aides, the fastest-growing “healthcare job,” the median weekly wage is down 6.6%; for retail salespeople, it is down 5.5%; for waiters and waitresses, down 5.1%, for janitors and cleaners, down 5.0%.

Thus the huge and continuing increase in food stamp use to 50 million; the 22 million Americans now living in “extreme poverty”; the fact, exposed by New York City Congressmen this week, that the average income for all minority households in New York City puts them in the official “low-wage worker” category.

Against this background, the White House wanted to raise Medicare premiums by an average of 15% in 2015 while freezing all Social Security and disability benefits. Congress blocked Obama from doing this, but replaced it with (1) cuts in eligibility for Social Security disability benefits, and (2) cuts in Medicare payments to outpatient clinics operated by or within hospitals.

Financial consultant Jim Rickards, of the Strategic Intelligence newsletter, used that title to describe a Wall Street debt bomb preparing to explode, like the mortgage derivatives bubble which melted down the banking system in 2007-08. Rickards’ piece is published in Australia’s Daily Reckoning financial blog.

Rickards outlines a 2015-16 crash of the commodities bubble, with oil debt blowing out. “The first place losses will appear are in junk bonds. There are about US$5.4 trillion … of costs incurred in the last five years for exploration, drilling, and infrastructure” with inefficient oil recovery at very high prices, which have long collapsed.

“With oil in the US$45-55 per barrel range, that debt will begin to default in late 2015 or early 2016.” In fact, 10 drilling companies have already declared insolvency in and around the Bakken Oil Shale Basin during October.

“That means those debts will need to be written off. How much? That’s a little bit more speculative. I think maybe 50% of it has to be written off. But let’s be conservative and assume only 20% will be written off. That’s a trillion dollars of losses that have not been absorbed or priced into the market.”

Rickards notes that “in 2007, the total amount of sub-prime and Alt-A loans was about US$1 trillion. The losses in that sector were well above 20%. There, you had a US$1 trillion market with $200 billion of losses. Here we’re talking about a US$5 trillion market with US$1 trillion of losses from unpaid debt — not counting derivatives.”

This is a warning about only one part of the immense bubble of debt linked to commodities which have collapsed in price, and the much larger arena of derivatives bets linked to them. One of the largest exposed “counterparty” holders in that derivatives arena is Deutsche Bank, and its crisis, like that of the big commodity companies, is rapidly heading in the direction of the “debt bomb” Rickards indicates.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Russia delivered a public warning Oct. 30 that the Obama Administration is contemplating a world war against Russia.

Dmitri Rogozin addressed journalists after a meeting of the Russian National Security Council, which may have discussed the subject, and denounced the United States’ “current Prompt Global Strike doctrine,” a strategy which plans to suppress an adversary’s (Russia’s or China’s) ability to retaliate against a pre-emptive first strike. Rogozin called it “illusory,” but in unmistakeable terms.

“The U.S. strategists are, for the first time, beginning to have an illusory vision that they may achieve victory over a nuclear power in a non-nuclear war. This is nonsense, this will never happen.” Rogozin said after the meeting, as quoted by TASS.

However, he seemed in fact to be warning of nuclear war, in discussing plans to revive “civil defense” in Russia. “But in the face of this threat, the task is to protect the population,” Rogozin said. “In essence, civil defense and safety facilities for the population are to be rebuilt anew and, most importantly, this activity should be streamlined properly.”

Rogozin made this warning as the largest NATO maneuver in many years, “Trident Juncture,” has gotten underway, including a practice of a pre-emptive strike on Russian forces.

While voices in the U.S. Democratic Party are beginning to attack Obama’s “illegal and unconstitutional” war plans, EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized throughout Obama’s second term that he is capable of, and likely to launch thermonuclear war against Russia and/or China, unless removed from the office of President for which he is unfit. 

On Wednesday Oct. 28, a meeting of Italian scientists took place in Padua, Italy, to offer a different view of climate science to the one pushed by the IPCC. The meeting was organized by the Associazione Termotecnica Italiana, a member of which invited also representatives of the LaRouche movement.

The most interesting speech was given by Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University and Naples University, who demonstrated that the IPCC neglects several natural oscillations in its 150-year-long temperature curve. Such oscillations have a centuries, thousands of years-long cycle. The IPCC considers only light radiation, neglecting the magnetic activity of the Sun and the motions of the large planets. If such data are inserted in the IPCC algorithm, they draw a temperature curve that 1) reproduces the “pause” in temperature increase during the last ten years; 2) reproduces the two cooling periods, one in the late ancient era and the other one in the 1600-1700s; and 3) forecasts for 2100 a temperature increase of just 2 degrees instead of 4 degrees.

By reducing by 50% the so-called anthropogenic factor and amplifying by 4-5 times the astronomical factor, a curve is obtained which explains the past, the present and, allows mankind, faced with the choice of either fighting a dubious temperature increase, or adapting to climate, to chose the latter option, “instead of destroying the economy in the attempt to control climate,” as Scafetta put it.

During the discussion period after the last panel, Movisol representative Flavio Tabanelli intervened by mentioning the work of Vernadsky, nuclear fusion, and the need to worry about how to keep the planet warm, because of the forecast of a long-term cooling. Several contacts were made during the event.