By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. In 2008 after our country’s huge financial collapse, everyone was too busy watching the trainwreck that was our economy to notice how unnecessary the support for Wall Street was. Our government bailed out the big banks that screwed us over, while Americans continued to drown in financial instability. Now a similar financial crash is looming–only this time with student loan defaults. Compare today’s student loan rate figures to mortgage delinquency rates after the 2008 crash and it becomes clear that Americans may be on the cusp of an unfortunate deja vu. History has shown us that when a financial or natural disaster hits the fan, the government uses the opportunity to wield its power to push through a controversial agendas that otherwise would not have been acceptable to the population. Are we approaching another crisis? How will it be handled? Lee Camp goes into detail on how crises are used and manipulated by politicians in a new episode of Redacted Tonight.
Newsletter 9/11, Anti-war Movement, China, Donald Trump, Economic collapse, George W. Bush, Inequality, james Mattis, Michael Flynn, North Korea, Russia, Terrorism, Venezuela, War and Militarism By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org
February 18th, 2017
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. With the Trump administration floundering and the movement opposed to him expanding, we need to be prepared for a possible shock doctrine moment, whether intentional or not, that could be used to unify the country around an unpopular president and shut down political dissent. If a crisis occurs, we need to use it, not to unify behind the President, but to rapidly explain how the crisis is part of the failed government policies of both parties, that it is a systemic problem of which Trump is a symptom and that the crisis means the movement must expand. If we succeed we will advance our cause even in a crisis whether it is self-created, provoked or blow back. We will not only blunt the potential of a Reichstag moment but turn it to our advantage to serve transformation of the nation. If we are to succeed, we must start preparing now. Those who are prepared for crisis, do best when it occurs.
By Jerome Roos for Tele Sur – It has been a dismal start to the year for world markets. After trading on the Chinese stock market was suspended twice last week when a collapse in share prices tripped an ill-conceived automatic “circuit breaker”, the resultant investor panic knocked more than $2.3 trillion off stocks worldwide — marking the worst start to a financial year on record. But while China’s stock market turmoil has grabbed all the attention and dominated headlines across the globe, the real threat to the world economy lies not in the country’s speculative stock exchange but in its “real” economy…
By Graham Summers, Phoenix Capital Research for Zero Hedge. For six years, the world has operated under a complete delusion that Central Banks somehow fixed the 2008 Crisis. All of the arguments claiming this defied common sense. A 5th grader would tell you that you cannot solve a debt problem by issuing more debt. If the below chart was a problem BEFORE 2008… there is no way that things are better now. After all, we’ve just added another $10 trillion in debt to the US system. Similarly, anyone with a functioning brain could tell you that a bunch of academics with no real-world experience, none of whom have ever started a business or created a single job can’t “save” the economy. We are heading for a crisis that will be exponentially worse than 2008. The global Central Banks have literally bet the financial system that their theories will work. They haven’t. All they’ve done is set the stage for an even worse crisis in which entire countries will go bankrupt. The situation is clear: the 2008 Crisis was the warm up. The next Crisis will be THE REAL Crisis. The Crisis in which Central Banking itself will fail.
Data released last week by the U.S. government showed the U.S. economy came to a near halt in the first three months of 2015, falling to nearly zero – i.e. a mere 0.2 percent annual growth rate for the January-March quarter. The collapse was the fourth time that the U.S. economy in the past four years either came to a virtual halt or actually declined. Four times in four years it has stalled out. So what’s going on? In 2011, the U.S. economy collapsed to 0.1 percent in terms of annual growth rate. At the end of 2012, to a mere 0.2 percent initial decline. In early 2014, it actually declined by -2.2 percent. And now in 2015, it is essentially flat once again at 0.2 percent. The numbers are actually even worse, if one discounts the redefinitions of GDP that were made by the US in 2013 . . . Back those redefinitions out, and the U.S. experienced negative GDP four times in the last four years. We get -0.2 percent in 2011, 0 percent in 2012, -2.5 percent in 2014 and -0.1 percent earlier this year.
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