ninjas (no income/no job/no assets)

portfolioist | I have just finished reading The Clash of Generations: Saving Ourselves, Our Kids, and Our Economy, the new book authored by Boston University Economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff and well-known financial journalist and advisor, Scott Burns. This is a truly important book, and I hope that it will be so widely read as to inspire a meaningful widespread dialog among individuals, families, and policymakers.

The central premise of The Clash of Generations is that we, as Americans, have essentially created a Ponzi scheme in which current and past workers have been promised future financial benefits in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that are vastly beyond the accumulated value of what they have contributed. The result is that future generations of workers are now expected to pay the tab. The authors assert that our children and grandchildren are being stuck with a truly monstrous financial burden in order to fulfill the utterly unsustainable promises made to current retirees and near-retirees. Kotlikoff and Burns conclude that the level of unfunded financial commitments being forced onto future generations is quite capable of essentially impoverishing future generations and killing any economic growth. While this argument is not new, Kotlikoff has studied these problems for much of his career and brings a truly authoritative perspective to bear (Kotlikoff and Burns previously published a book devoted to these issues, as well).

 How can this situation have gotten so far out of balance? Kotlikoff and Burns suggest that politicians have simply and shamelessly pandered to older people who, as a group, aggressively promote their interests and vote accordingly. In 1983, the Social Security administration added a plan to gradually raise the age at which people would receive full benefits from age 65 to 67. This one change, accompanied by no reduction in benefits growth for older people, equates to an average 25% reduction in real benefits received by those who would receive full benefits at age 67. The younger workers are expected to pay into the system for two additional years (ages 65-67) and then will have fewer years to draw benefits (because they start later). In aggregate, this is a large effective reduction in benefits for the young. The results, in aggregate, are that older people can expect to receive much more in benefits than they have paid in to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and young people can expect to pay in more than they will receive in benefits. While Kotlikoff and Burns do not go into these numbers, I summarized the research in a blog post titled, “Social Security and Retirement: The Reality“ that I published in 2011. A great deal of this issue comes down to fairness between generations. The authors estimate, for example, that today’s 20-year olds will need to pay 3.3% of their lifetime earnings to cover the under-funding of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by previous generations, along with their own contributions, to these programs needed to sustain them.

Is this fair and reasonable by any standard? I should say not.

Greece 2012 - black-shirts smashing migrants' homes and swastikas on the streets...,

dailymail | Academics in Greece warn of disturbing parallels between the rise of the Right today in an economically crippled country indebted to the EU and the rise of the Nazis in the Thirties after hyper-inflation in Germany’s Weimar Republic led to economic collapse.

Between the wars, you may recall, an indebted Germany was forced to make huge reparation payments to the victorious Allies of the Great War as a punishment for starting the conflict. The German people felt humiliated, just as the Greeks feel hostile to their eurozone masters and Mrs Merkel today.

The Nazis claimed their first parliamentary seats even as they were garnering the local support of Germans by sending out gangs of ‘storm troopers’ to terrorise Jewish and immigrant communities and blame them for the troubles of the time. It sounds horribly familiar.

As Nickos Dermetzis, a professor of political science at the Athens University, explains: ‘We have a major socio-economic crisis in which native Greeks are losing ground. You also have a rising number of immigrants, many illegal.

`This is a volcanic situation where all the classic parameters for the flourishing of a Far-Right force such as Gold Dawn are present.’

Of course, it does not help that police are struggling to cope with the huge numbers of illegal immigrants arriving daily in Greece. Their sweeps of immigrants happen regularly in Athens and the port of Patras, a three-hour drive away, where a thousand immigrants doss down in disused factory buildings near the promenade. They wait, hoping to smuggle themselves on to freight and passenger ferries going to Italy.

Ten days ago, 350 Afghanis, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were picked up in Patras and put in holding centres. As one disgruntled resident, a man in his 50s living near the promenade, said: ‘They only took a few and so many are here. I am no racist, but this town used to be paradise. The police sweeps are a merry-go-round. The ones they took today will be back next week, wait and see.’

It is a viewpoint supported by Andreas Nicolacopoulos. The 59-year-old architect is a leading light in the Patras Golden Dawn party.

‘The Greek people don’t want illegal immigrants,’ he says. ‘They have to be deported to their own countries. We have to stop them coming in, too. We will lay landmines at the Turkish-Greek border to blow them up so they do not enter our country. We have promised our voters this.’

Golden Dawn also wants to make immigrant criminals serve double the prison terms of their Greek counterparts and introduce capital punishment for foreign murderers.

Back in Athens, I meet Golden Dawn’s spokesman, MP Iliopoulos Panagiotis, at the Greek Parliament building.

The face of this 34-year-old former internet marketing executive can be seen clearly on the video of immigrants being attacked at the market by Golden Dawn’s louts.

Mr Panagiotis is in bullish form. He boasts that the party is so popular that at the next election it will be the second biggest in Greece. ‘In a few years, we expect to be the biggest of them all,’ he says.

The party’s MPs arrogantly puff on cigarettes even though smoking is banned inside the parliament building. They wear black shirts with the word ‘Hooligans’ emblazoned in orange on the sleeve. They have tattoos on their arms.

And on the walls are the blue flags stamped with the party’s swastika-style logo, an ancient Greek symbol.

The official Golden Dawn line is that they are not Nazis, even neo-Nazis, but nationalists wanting to save Greece for the Greek.

So what does Mr Panagiotis plan for illegal immigrants? ‘We will fly every one of them home,’ he says.

‘Even Pakistan would not dare shoot our planes down when their own people are on board and would be killed.’

And what does he think of the racist Golden Dawn gangs that systematically beat up those who were not born Greek?

‘We have a million supporters, some of them wilder elements. We cannot control them all,’ he says with a smirk.

It is hard to believe that his words are those of an elected MP in the Parliament of a modern democracy. Yet anything is possible now in Greece, as the unpalatable face of fascism makes an unwelcome return to Europe.

seoul flaunts the come up...,

WaPo | Americans aren’t particularly accustomed to foreign music competing with their own in global markets, so when the South Korean song “Gangnam Style” popped onto U.S. music charts, it was something of a wake-up call. Korean pop music has been thriving in East Asia for years, which is remarkable in itself given the country’s small size and the wealth of successful musicians in its bigger and richer neighbor Japan.

So how do Korea’s music companies do it? Part of the industry’s success comes from being just that: industrial. Musicians are meticulously groomed, songs set to careful formulas, and all of it processed on a grand scale. The New Yorker’s John Seabrook explained the concept of “cultural technology,” a factory-like system whereby everything from composer nationality to eye shadow color to hand gestures is pre-determined by formula and protocol. Seabrook suggests that the “cultural technology” model produces music “too robotic to make it in the West” — the music’s painstaking earnestness also doesn’t quite translate for Americans — and K-pop has indeed long struggled to make it big in Western markets.

How, then, to explain the sudden U.S. success of “Gangnam Style,” written and performed by a K-popper who is of the “cultural technology” system but also an aberration within it: older, less attractive (sorry) and more satirical than his K-compatriots? How did Psy manage to utilize the successes of “cultural technology” — he’s got Americans mimicking his dance and glued to his video, in true K-pop form — while also overcoming the more “robotic” aspects of it that have hampered its Western reach?

The answer may have to do with the timing of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” in which the largely agrarian dictatorship became a wealthy and developed democracy in a few short decades. The country became rich enough to support a big domestic music industry during a time when the way people consume music was changing. Fist tap Dale.

seoul taunts pyonyang...,

NYTimes | North Korea threatened on Friday to attack the South if activists proceeded with a plan to send leaflets across the border criticizing the North Korean regime. South Korea’s military said it would immediately strike back if the North did so.

The exchange of saber-rattling, though hardly unprecedented, comes at a politically sensitive time in South Korea, where a presidential election is to be held in December and parties are highly attuned to how a surprise North Korean move might affect the outcome. 

An umbrella group of anti-North Korean organizations, mostly led by defectors from the North, has announced plans to release balloons bearing propaganda leaflets on Monday in Imjingak, a South Korean village near the western border with North Korea. Activists have conducted similar balloon launches near the border before. 

The statement Friday, released by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, said that as soon as a balloon launch is detected, the North Korean People’s Army “without warning will start a merciless attack” targeting Imjingak and its surroundings. “The leaflets are a most undisguised act of psychological warfare, a violation of the armistice and an intolerable act of war,” the statement said. It urged South Koreans to leave the targeted area. 

The two Koreas are technically at war, the 1950-53 Korean War having ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. They have engaged in several skirmishes in recent years. 

Speaking to lawmakers on Friday, the South Korean defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, noted that North Korea had issued similar threats before about leaflets from the South, without following up on them. But he said that if North Korea does strike, “we will eradicate their origin of attack.” 

Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who is organizing the leaflet campaign, said his group remained undeterred. “We send facts about the North Korean regime to the North Korean people through peaceful means,” he said. “We will send our balloons as planned.”

silly rabbits...,

the second u.s. presidential debate...,

                                                                                                                       

what romney's economic proposals portend...,

atheistethicist | Over the course of the next four days, I am going to discuss four reasons why Romney's economic intentions will fail.

Furthermore, I will make this criticism from within the context of free-market economics. Effectively, I will make it from a context which Romney's running mate Paul Ryan would have to agree with - if he is at all consistent with the free-market principles he claims to uphold.

Free market economics actually tries to be about the real world. It tries to incorporate facts about the real world into its system. What Romney and company is peddling, on the other hand, is a cheap knock-off of capitalism that profits the seller and poisons the buyer. They steam the label off of capitalism and put it on their snake-oil as a way of increasing sales - a way of getting more voters to buy it. It will kill some of those buyers, maim others, and otherwise impoverish still more. It will, however, profit the sellers.

In order for Romney's snake-oil to be effective, the following four things will have to be true:

(1) There are no positive externalities.

(2) There are no negative externalities

(3) All agents are perfectly rational and fully informed.

(4) All agents have the same economic power.

In the real world, none of these are true. Consequently, in the real world, Romney's snake oil will not work. The sellers will pocket the money, but the buyers will end up no better off as a result of the snake-oil. Some will end up significantly worse off.

the american economy is running on empty...,

NYTimes | The American economy is running on empty. That’s the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let’s assume for a moment that he’s right. The political consequences would be enormous.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” Gordon predicts a dark future of “epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years.” The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions:

IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.

Gordon argues that each of these revolutions was followed by a period of economic expansion, particularly industrial revolution number two, which saw “80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972.” According to Gordon, once “the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before.” Industrial revolution number 3, he writes

created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.

Over most of human history, in Gordon’s view, the world had minimal economic growth, if it had any at all — and “there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely.” Gordon’s paper suggests instead that “the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.”

The United States faces “headwinds” that could cut annual growth in Gross Domestic Product to as little as 0.2 percent annually, which is one tenth the rate of growth from 1860 to 2007.

70 acres of mobile "diplomacy"...,

globalsecurity | Sometimes it is difficult to understand the scope of American military power relative to that of the rest of the world. This graphic illustrates America's aircraft carriers, and those of the rest of the world. Each icon is an accurate depiction of the flight deck of the ship as seen from above, all to a common scale. Each of the middle column of ships is roughly the size of the Empire State Building.

suddenly I'm living below the poverty line!!!

guardian | The first visit to the food bank is always the hardest. Michelle Venus, 52, cried. "Not while I was there," she said. "But before and after." Four years earlier, she'd been a homeowner in a $75,000 a year job. She'd donated to the food bank's fundraising drives. Now she was there to pick up food she couldn't afford to buy. "It was not what I'd expected for myself or from myself. It was just a really hard day."

Mark Weaver, 54, the former chairman of nearby Loveland chamber of commerce, tried to avoid the gaze of acquaintances he'd met when he attended the food bank's galas. "It was very humiliating," he says. "I used to take clients to their events, and all of a sudden I'm living below the poverty line." He used to earn a six-figure salary plus commission plus benefits, and also chaired the Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance, which lobbied local politicians on behalf of the business community. He made up his mind to go after a friend, a well-paid software engineer who'd also fallen on hard times, told him to: "Get over being proud."

The queue at the Larimer County food bank in Fort Collins, a town of 147,000 in northern Colorado, snakes out of the door and is mostly silent. In line there are slightly more people than trolleys. The number of families visiting here has increased more than 50% over the last five years. On average they also visit more often and need more food.

In the parking lot there are only two bumper stickers – one for Mitt Romney and one for the US navy. Inside it is set up like a grocery store. People take what they need, although there are limits for some items such as bread. From the outside, if you didn't know it was a food bank, you might think they were going to the cinema.

People often think they know what poverty looks like until they end up here, and then they realise it looks like them and many other people that they know. Weaver lives in a nice area. The first he knew that his next-door neighbour was struggling with his mortgage payments was when his house was foreclosed on and he was moving out.

The official poverty rate in the US has risen 19% since 2000 with just under one in seven Americans now poor and one in five reporting they did not have enough money to buy food last year.

louisiana sinkhole now 4 acres across...,

wlox | Issues continue to pile on crews working on the growing sinkhole in Assumption Parish.

Texas Brine, the company that owns a failed salt cavern blamed for the sinkhole says it will comply with new orders.

Texas Brine continues clean up Monday, but is limited to skimming as boats will not be allowed in the sinkhole due to the activity of removing hydrocarbons from the cavern. This is for the safety of workers as the removal of the hydrocarbons may cause pressure changes that could affect the sinkhole.

The current size of the sinkhole is just under four acres. 

State officials are ordering further testing along with monitoring and removal of natural gas trapped underground.

Residents are still evacuated; they left their homes in early August.

Below is a summary of the directives that Texas Brine was ordered to perform in DNR's Third Amendment to the Declaration of Emergency & Directives (issued on 10/11/2012).

On or before Tuesday, October 16, 2012:

1. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan for installing and monitoring additional Geoprobe wells to monitor water quality/ pressures in the Bayou Corne community; install & monitor permanent elevation benchmark at each Geoprobe well location by a professional licensed surveyor;
2. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan to install a continuous pressure monitor on Oxy Geismar #3- to monitor pressure and provide for telemetry monitoring of this pressure. This telemetry shall be reported in real time to the Assumption OEP , the Assumption Parish Sheriff's Office, and the Office of Conservation to notify them if any rapid pressure changes that indicate changing conditions in the cavern;

On or before Friday, October 19, 2012:

1. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan to install a permanent continuous water level monitoring station near the edge of the sinkhole. This station shall include a sensor and recording system for monitoring and recording the water levels and a staff gauge for visual observation of water elevation or depth. The data from this station shall be downloaded weekly and forwarded to Dept. of Conservation on a weekly basis;
2. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan to evaluate the alluvial aquifer water production, groundwater flow, sinkhole chlorides, TDS (Total Dissolved Salinity) and hydrocarbon migration and to mitigate adverse impacts to aquifer sustainability from use of Texas Brine Company LLC's water wells;

On or before Thursday, October 25, 2012:

1. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan to implement a seismic monitoring and notification system to allow for real time data processing and interpretation of micro-seismic data. The current array should be expanded as necessary to assess the current stability of the collapse zone. The seismic data shall be reported in real time to the Assumption OEP , the Assumption Parish Sheriff's Office, and the Office of Conservation to notify them of sudden changes in the cavern or surrounding the sinkhole;
2. Texas Brine must begin installing the groundwater observation/vent well in the vicinity of the core-hole where the ten-feet of gas in the aquifer was observed;

On or before Tuesday, November 13, 2012:

1. Texas Brine must provide Dept. of Conservation with a plan to collect, interpret, and report  geophysical data that will determine the nature and extent of the collapse structure from the base of the original cavern to the ground surface. This geophysical data may include (but not is limited to) vertical seismic profiling, cross-hole seismic and tomography, and 3D seismic.

human resources

the ultimate consumer products road map

the obesity epidemic explained?

document, measure, and evaluate superintendents, principals, and teachers alike - and hold them accountable for clearly defined expectations!

NYTimes | AS the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.

We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.

There has been much discussion of the question of how to evaluate teachers; it was one of the biggest sticking points in the recent teachers’ strike in Chicago. For more than a decade I’ve been a strong proponent of teacher accountability. I’ve advocated for ending tenure and other rules that get in the way of holding educators responsible for the achievement of their students. Indeed, the teachers in my schools — Harlem Village Academies — all work with employment-at-will contracts because we believe accountability is an underlying prerequisite to running an effective school. The problem is that, unlike charters, most schools are prohibited by law from holding teachers accountable at all.

But the solution being considered by many states — having the government evaluate individual teachers — is a terrible idea that undermines principals and is demeaning to teachers. If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale.

Education and political leaders across the country are currently trying to decide how to evaluate teachers. Some states are pushing for legislation to sort teachers into categories using unreliable mathematical calculations based on student test scores. Others have hired external evaluators who pop into classrooms with checklists to monitor and rate teachers. In all these scenarios, principals have only partial authority, with their judgments factored into a formula.

This type of system shows a profound lack of understanding of leadership. Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement. At Harlem Village Academies we give teachers an enormous amount of freedom and respect. As one of our seventh-grade reading teachers told me: “It’s exhilarating to be trusted. It makes me feel like I can be the kind of teacher I had always dreamed about becoming: funny, interesting, effective and energetic.”

Some of the new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings, have been described as businesslike, but that is just not true. Successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don’t use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.

the REAL reason america used atomic weapons against japan

Washingtonsblog | History.com notes:

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

New Scientist reported in 2005:

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”
***
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
***
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

John Pilger points out:

The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

We’ll give the last word to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:

Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
***
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
***
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
***
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.

how do you survive an economic collapse caused by the contraction of credit, where credit is the medium of exchange in everyday transactions?

Necklace of wampum. During trade the beads were counted, removed, and re-assembled on new necklaces. Native American shell beads were also sometimes woven into belts or other mnemonic and ceremonial devices that demonstrated the wealth and commitment of a tribe to a treaty.

szabo | From the very start, England's 17th century colonies in America had a problem -- a shortage of coins [D94, T01] The British idea was to grow large amounts of tobacco, cut timber for the ships of their global navy and merchant marine, and so forth, sending in return the supplies they felt were needed to keep the Americans working. In effect, early colonists were supposed to both work for the company and shop at the company store. The investors and the Crown much preferred this to paying in coin what the farmers might ask, letting the farmers themselves buy the supplies -- and, heaven forbid, keep some of the profit as well. 

The colonists' solution was at hand, but it took a few years for them to recognize it. The natives had money, but it was very different from the money Europeans were used to. American Indians had been using money for millenia, and quite useful money it turned out to be for the newly arrived Europeans -- despite the prejudice among some that only metal with the faces of their political leaders stamped on it constituted real money. Worse, the New England natives used neither silver nor gold. Instead, they used the most appropriate money to be found in their environment --durable skeleton parts of their prey. Specifically, they used wampum, shells of the clam venus mercenaria and its relatives, strung onto pendants.

Clams were found only at the ocean, but wampum traded far inland. Sea-shell money of a variety of types could be found in tribes across the American continent. The Iriquois managed to collect the largest wampum treasure of any tribe, without venturing anywhere near the clam's habitat. [D94]. Only a handful of tribes, such as the Narragansetts, specialized in manufacturing wampum, while hundreds of other tribes, many of them hunter-gatherers, used it. Wampum pendants came in a variety of lengths, with the number of beads proportional to the length. Pendants could be cut or joined to form a pendant of length equal to the price paid.

Once they got over their hangup about what constitutes real money, the colonists went wild trading for and with wampum. Clams entered the American vernacular as another way to say "money". The Dutch governor of New Amsterdram (now New York) took out a large loan from an English-American bank -- in wampum. After a while the British authorities were forced to go along. So between 1637 and 1661, wampum became legal tender in New England. Colonists now had a liquid medium of exchange, and trade in the colonies flourished. [D94].

The beginning of the end of wampum came when the British started shipping more coin to the Americas, and Europeans started applying their mass-manufacturing techniques. By 1661, British authorities had thrown in the towel, and decided it would pay in coin of the realm -- which being real gold and silver, and its minting audited and branded by the Crown, had even better monetary qualities than shells. In that year wampum ceased to be legal tender in New England. In 1710 briefly became legal tender in North Carolina. It continued to be used as a medium of exchange, in some cases into the 20th century -- but its value had been inflated one hundred fold by Western harvesting and manufacturing techniques, and it gradually went the route that gold and silver jewelry had gone in the West after the invention of coinage -- from well crafted money to decoration. The American language of shell money became a quaint holdover -- "a hundred clams" became "a hundred dollars". "Shelling out" came to mean paying in coins or bills, and eventually by check or credit card. [D94] Little did we know that we had touched the very origins of our species.

no wonder we've heard scant little about her...,

wikipedia | In 2003 she was accused of conspiring to act as an unregistered lobbyist for the Iraqi Intelligence Service and engaging in prohibited financial transactions with the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein.^[1][2][3] Lindauer was found mentally unfit to stand trial in two separate hearings. During her incarceration she won the right to refuse forced antipsychotic medication which the Department of Justice claimed would render her competent to stand trial.^[4][5] She was released in 2006 and all charges were dropped in 2009.^[6]

rotflmbao...,

will the military "war on drugs" hold up politically as well as the military "war on terror"?

NYTimes | The Honduran Air Force pilot did not know what to do. It was the dead of night, and he was chasing a small, suspected drug plane at a dangerously low altitude, just a few hundred feet above the Caribbean. He fired warning shots, but instead of landing, the plane flew lower and closer to the sea.

“So the pilot made a decision, thinking it was the best thing to do,” said Arturo Corrales, Honduras’s foreign minister, one of several officials to give the first detailed account of the episode. “He shot down the plane.”

Four days later, on July 31, it happened again. Another flight departed from a small town on the Venezuelan coast, and using American radar intelligence, a Honduran fighter pilot shot it down over the water. 

How many people were killed? Were drugs aboard, or innocent civilians? Officials here and in Washington say they do not know. The planes were never found. But the two episodes — clear violations of international law and established protocols — have ignited outrage in the United States, bringing one of its most ambitious international offensives against drug traffickers to a sudden halt just months after it started. 

All joint operations in Honduras are now suspended. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, expressing the concerns of several Democrats in Congress, is holding up tens of millions of dollars in security assistance, not just because of the planes, but also over suspected human rights abuses by the Honduran police and three shootings in which commandos with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration effectively led raids when they were only supposed to act as advisers. 

The downed aircraft, in particular, reminded veteran officials of an American missionary plane that was shot down in 2001 by Peruvian authorities using American intelligence. It was only a matter of time, they said, before another plane with the supposedly guilty turned out to be filled with the innocent. 

But the clash between the Obama administration and lawmakers had been building for months. Fearful that Central America was becoming overrun by organized crime, perhaps worse than in the worst parts of Mexico, the State Department, the D.E.A. and the Pentagon rushed ahead this year with a muscular antidrug program with several Latin American nations, hoping to protect Honduras and use it as a chokepoint to cut off the flow of drugs heading north. 

Then the series of fatal enforcement actions — some by the Honduran military, others involving shootings by American agents — quickly turned the antidrug cooperation, often promoted as a model of international teamwork, into a case study of what can go wrong when the tactics of war are used to fight a crime problem that goes well beyond drugs.

why war against our origins and our possibilities?

realitysandwich | Various traditions recall the events of a "First Supper." In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story unfolds in a garden called Eden. In that version of the myth, a serpent persuades humans to eat the fruit of a sacred Tree of Knowledge, thus bringing man and God together. In the patriarchal reformation of Judaism, with its morbid dread of the power of the goddess, the story of the First Supper was revised. But even there, the jealous god observes that the food made humans more like Himself, endowed with knowledge of good and evil and the wisdom of the angels.

Such substances are now termed entheogens. Combining the ancient Greek adjective entheos ("inspired, animated with deity") and the verbal root in genesis ("becoming"), it signifies "something that causes the divine to reside within one." When used in rituals, entheogens can be seen as sacramental substances whose ingestion provides a communion and shared existence between the human and the divine. In the context of ceremony and ritual, the individual becomes "at one with God."

Prior to the recent revival of interest in psychoactive plants and compounds, the need for a new word for these botanical mediators led psychiatrist Humphry Osmond to coin the term psychedelic, "to fathom Hell or soar angelic," as he described it in a letter to Aldous Huxley. Within just a few years, however, conservative backlash against the 1960s counterculture had contaminated the word with the perception of criminality, recklessness, and abuse. The term was derived from the Greek words psyche, for the "human mind, soul or spirit," and delos, "clear, manifest." In fact, early experimentation with such substances in the modern West suggested similarity with psychotic states, as implied in the coinage ofpsychotropic.

An entheogen is any substance that, when ingested, catalyzes or generates an altered state of consciousness that is deemed to have spiritual significance. Symbolic surrogates, lacking the appropriate chemistry of psychoactive plants and compounds, may induce a similar experience through cultural indoctrination and suggestion or personal subjectivity, and could also be termed entheogens. Like shamanism itself, entheogenic spirituality is dependent upon and defined by the states of consciousness experienced. In many cultures, accessing such states is considered culturally essential to the perpetuation of a society's underlying natural and spiritual interconnection with the cosmos. Altered states of consciousness are very often considered indispensable to such core shamanic practices as diagnosis of ailments, curing, soul retrieval, and communication with deceased ancestors.

In myth, transformations of consciousness are an integral element in the basic story of the hero or heroine who encounters pathways of communication between the human and an otherwise invisible realm, and such experiences are viewed as part of the ongoing renewal of the community's spiritual well-being. These transformations even underlie the semishamanic philosophies of Gnosis in the ancient Classical world. Among other peoples, they ensure perpetual contact with the wisdom and benevolence of the spiritual worlds.

Generally speaking, however, the study of entheogens is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as is their recognition as a formative influence on the shaping of both shamanic and so-called developed cultures. It is now widely accepted among specialists that entheogens and the ethnopharmacology of their plant sources represent one of the most direct, powerful, reliable, and indeed ancient means of inducing "authentic" shamanic states of consciousness. Entheogens may, in fact, be the most reliable way of inducing a profound and sustained alteration of consciousness commonly associated with ecstatic, shamanic states. Hence they are at the heart of such dependable and repeatable ceremonies as initiation rituals and other religious Mysteries.

When entheogens are taken in the context of a society's sacred shamanic ceremonies, the culture's mythopoetic traditions are often relived and reinfused with profound immediacy and power, heightening their spiritual sense of connection.

Entheogenic epiphany is commonly described as a state in which people experience their individual distinctions dissolve in a mystical, consubstantial communion with a force of profound sacred meaning. This ecstatic experience is interpreted as a pure and primal consciousness and sometimes described as the direct contact with the unobscured root of being. Since shamanic spirituality is inherently practical, it ascribes the highest importance to the regular access to such transcendental states; this point of contact ensures the undisturbed continuation of natural cycles and helps perpetually maintain a society's underlying sense of centeredness, equilibrium, and balance. From a shamanic perspective, ecstatic contact also protects against the potential dangers of unappeased or neglected gods or spirits. The entheogenic experience, though entirely strange, dissimilar, and inexplicable in mundane language, is often described as feeling more real and vibrant than ordinary consciousness.

wait, why no comparable mainstream backstory on the cia selected sinaloa syndicate?

ABCNews | The new head of the Zetas drug cartel is a former Dallas resident who is scorned as a traitor by many of his own cartel soldiers and mocked as an ex-"car washer" by his enemies, but has risen to power thanks to a fearsome reputation for violence.

"[Miguel Angel Trevino Morales] is extremely brutal, to the point of sadism," says George Grayson, an expert on the Zetas. "He is prepared to advance his interest through unspeakable violence." Grayson's recent book on the cartel, "The Executioner's Men," opens with a scene in which Trevino Morales slowly beats a female police officer to death, in front of her colleagues, with a two-by-four.

Trevino Morales, also known as El 40 or the Monkey, became the uncontested head of the Mexico's most feared drug cartel when former kingpin Heriberto Lazcano was killed in a shootout with Mexican Marines on Sunday. Lazcano had been linked to hundreds of murders, including the massacre of 72 civilians, but Trevino Morales is allegedly even more bloodthirsty. One of his preferred methods of dealing with enemies, say authorities, is burning them alive.

Trevino Morales, 41, was born in Mexico but spent some of his formative years in Dallas, Texas, where authorities say he had a criminal record as a teenager. He has a dozen siblings and reportedly still has family in the Dallas area.

According to the Associated Press, he became a teen go-fer for the Los Tejas gang, which was powerful in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.

Trevino Morales joined the Zetas soon after their formation. The Zetas began in the late 1990s as the security wing of the Gulf Cartel. The 14 core members of the Zetas, including Heriberto Lazcano, all had military backgrounds, and took ranks based on when they'd joined the group. Lazcano was known as Z-3. By 2004, due to the death of Z-1 and the arrest of Z-2, Lazcano had become the leader of the Zetas.

NPR Chicago World View Discussion of Fukushima and World Nuclear Politics

NRC whistleblowers warn of nuclear accidents caused by dam failures and effort to suppress disclosure

beyondnuclear | Independent warnings from government whistleblowers within the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have surfaced alleging that U.S. nuclear power stations sited along major rivers and below reservoirs are vulnerable to a catastrophic nuclear accident following major dam failures.

In July 2011 with the flood waters along the Missouri River still rising around Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun nuclear power station, David Loveless, a NRC Senior Reactor Analyst concluded in a post-Fukushima technical review for the flood analysis at the nuclear power stations, that the reactor would not survive the gross failure of the Oahe dam—one of six dams on the Missouri River upstream from the nuke. Loveless cites analysis that a dam break would hit the reactor on the Missouri River with a wall of water knocking out electrical power systems and water pumps vital  for reactor cooling.  The group, Clean Nebraska, has recently written to NRC Chairwomen Allison Macfarland in an appeal to not allow the restart of the reactor pending a full investigation.

Then in September 2012, Richard Perkins, an Nuclear Reactor Regulations engineer and the lead author of “Flooding of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Following Upstream Dam Failure,” asked the agency’s Office of Inspector General to investigate his allegations that the NRC “staff intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public”  where “agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it. Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public.”

Perkins further charges that his concerns regard a government deliberate cover-up and violation of law involving fraudulent safety claims to surrounding communities and their representatives.

Another NRC anonymous whistleblower, drew even more attention to risk of nuclear accidents following dam failure to the Oconee reactor in Senecca, South Carolina, stating, “The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi,” the engineer said. “And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man-made ‘tsunami’ resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will –- with absolute certainty –- result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.

for "those deemed" essential

the hunted and the hated...,

thenation | Exclusive audio obtained by The Nation of a stop-and-frisk carried out by the New York Police Department freshly reveals the discriminatory and unprofessional way in which this controversial policy is being implemented on the city’s streets. 

On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin and two of the officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action.

In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.” 

“He grabbed me by my bookbag and he started pushing me down. So I’m going backwards like down the hill and he just kept pushing me, pushing me, it looked like he we was going to hit me,” Alvin recounts. “I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back.”

Alvin’s treatment at the hands of the officers may be disturbing but it is not uncommon. According to their own stop-and-frisk data, the NYPD stops more than 1,800 New Yorkers a day. A New York Times analysis recently determined that more than 20 percent of those stops involve the use of force. And these are only the numbers that the Department records.  Anecdotal evidence suggests both figures are much higher.

In this video, exclusive to TheNation.com, Alvin describes his experience of the stop, and working NYPD officers come forward to explain the damage stop-and-frisk has done to their profession and their relationship to the communities they serve. The emphasis on racking up stops has also hindered what many officers consider to be the real work they should be doing on the streets. The video sheds unprecedented light on a practice, cheered on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, that has put the city’s young people of color in the department’s crosshairs.

Those who haven’t experienced the policy first-hand “have likened Stops to being stuck in an elevator, or in traffic,” says Darius Charney, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “This is not merely an inconvenience, as the Department likes to describe it. This is men with guns surrounding you in the street late at night when you’re by yourself. You ask why and they curse you out and rough you up.”

“The tape brings to light what so many New Yorkers have experienced in the shadows at the hands of the NYPD,” says Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP. “It is time for Mayor Bloomberg to come to grips with the scale of the damage his policies have inflicted on our children and their families. No child should have to grow up fearing both the cops and the robbers.”

“This audio confirms what we’ve been hearing from communities of color, again and again,” says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “They are repeatedly subjected to abusive and disrespectful treatment at the hands of the NYPD. This explains why so many young people don’t trust the police and won’t help the police,” she adds. “It’s not good for law enforcement and not good for the individuals who face this harassment.” Fist tap Dale.

why has the cia given the sinaloa cartel the dope franchise in chicago?

businessinsider | Leaked emails from the private U.S. security firm Stratfor cite a Mexican diplomat who says the U.S. government works with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs into the United States and has sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.

Many people have doubted the quality of Stratfor's intelligence, but the information from MX1—a Mexican foreign service officer who doubled as a confidential source for Stratfor—seems to corroborate recent claims about U.S. involvement in the drug war in Mexico.

Most notably, the reports from MX1 line up with assertions by a Sinaloa cartel insider that cartel boss Joaquin Guzman is a U.S. informant, the Sinaloa cartel was "given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago," and Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartelin exchange for information used to take down rival cartels. Fist tap Dale.

american moral degeneracy

paulcraigroberts | On May 31, 2010, the Israeli right-wing government sent armed military troops to illegally board in international waters Gaza aid ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. The Israelis murdered 8 Turkish citizens and one US citizen in cold blood. Many others were wounded by the forces of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Despite the murder of its citizen, Washington immediately took the side of the crazed Israeli government. The Turks had a different response. The prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, said that the next aid ships would be protected by the Turkish navy. But Washington got hold of its puppet and paid him to shut up. Once upon a time, the Turks were a fierce people. Today they are Washington’s puppets.

We have witnessed this during the past week. The Turkish government is permitting the Islamists from outside Syria, organized by the CIA and Israel, to attack Syria from Turkish territory. On several occasions a mortar shell has, according to news reports if you believe them, fallen just inside the Turkey border. The Turkish military has used the excuse to launch artillery barrages into Syria.

People who with good cause no longer believe the US and western media or the US and western governments think that the mortar shells were fired by US or Israeli operatives, or by the “rebels” they support, in order to give Turkey the excuse to start a NATO war with Syria. A UN sanctioned NATO invasion or air strikes, as in Libya, has been blocked by the Russians and Chinese. But if Syria and Turkey get into a war, NATO must come to the aid of its NATO member, Turkey.

Once again we see that Muslims are easily dominated and slaughtered by Western countries, because Muslim countries are incapable of supporting one another. Instead of supporting one another, Muslim governments accept payoffs to support instead the Christian/Zionist forces of the Western bloc.

Washington knows this, which is one reason why Washington began its assertion of world hegemony in the Muslim Middle East.

In the West, the Ministry of Propaganda continues to talk about the “Syrian revolt.” There is no revolt. What has happened is that the US and Israel have equipped with weapons and sent into Syria Islamists who wish to overthrow the secular Syrian government. Washington knows that if the Syrian government can be destroyed, the country will dissolve into warring factions like Iraq and Libya.

America’s European and Japanese puppet states are, of course, part of Washington’s operation. There will be no complaints from them. But why is the rest of the world content for Washington to interfere in the sovereign affairs of nations to the point of invading, sending in drones and assassination teams, and murdering vast numbers of citizens in seven countries?

Does this acquiescence mean that the world has accepted Washington’s claim that it is the indispensable country with the right to rule the world?

why IS Newsweek indulging make-believe?

gawker | For millennia, humans have wondered what happens after we die. Finally, we have a definitive answer: this week, in an exclusive cover story, Newsweek reveals that "Heaven Is Real." And it sounds suspiciously like a DMT trip as described on internet drug forums.

For nearly as long as humans have been thinking about the possibility of an afterlife, they've also been reading the "Experiences" essays on Erowid.org — accounts of trips and experimentations written by conscientious drug users. Finally, the two pastimes converge, in "Heaven Is Real: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife," possibly the most embarrassing cover story Newsweek has ever run, in which Dr. Eben Alexander falls into a coma and apparently, uh, goes to heaven.

Alexander's account of his experience is exactly as well-written, exactly as scientific, and exactly as interesting as most of the stories in Erowid's "Experience Vault." And that's not the only similarity! Below, take our test: Newsweek cover story or message-board post about drugs? Winners get to go to heaven.

 1) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or Ayahuasca Experience "The Din of Celestial Birds"?

"Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms."

2) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Experience "Rebirth and Translucent Beings"? "A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. [... T]he joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise — that if the joy didn't come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it."

3) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or DMT Experience "The People Behind the Curtain"? "As I walked deeper, I could see, standing in the middle of the room, [...] an object similar to an hour glass. It was slowly turning over. I became aware that this vessel, as it tipped over, transferring its contents from the small red end to the larger blue end, was transforming me."

4) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or LSD, DXM, Dimenhydinate & Cannabis Experience "In Search of a Meaningful... Something"? "If the head is the center of vision, what I saw encompassed a field extending to behind the ears. A fury of colors came into focus throughout this field, and out of the overwhelming mass of color a being emerged. Although the origin and nature of this being were not known to me, I was in awe of it, and I knew that I was powerless in its presence. It both hated and adored me and communicated through ambient noise which held my undivided attention."

why DOES the History Channel show Ancient Aliens?

9 million elderly at risk of an empty pantry...,

usatoday | About twice a week, when the arthritis in her legs allows it, Judy Slover rises in her one-bedroom apartment at the Rug Mill Towers in Freehold and makes the six-block trek on foot to the food pantry here, Freehold Area Open Door.Sometimes the walk takes a half-hour, sometimes more, all depending on how much pain she feels, she says.

At Open Door, she picks up bread and pasta, apples and oranges, onions and potatoes, maybe some frozen chicken and hamburger; thanks the volunteers; then journeys home. Some days, she can't make the trip at all, says Slover, 60, who also copes with diabetes and depression.

"I've been homeless," she said. "I have no support team. They call me the bag lady, but I gotta do what I gotta do, you know? Nobody's been there for me but Open Door."

Slover is among about 9 million people 50 and older living at risk of going hungry every day, a 79% increase in a decade, according to the AARP.

As they desperately fall behind even more in the wake of job losses and obliterated retirement investments and savings, advocates say it will take more aggressive and creative approaches to help the nation's eldest citizens get food on the table.

Carlos Rodriguez, executive director of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, says there are multiple reasons for the rise in seniors' food insecurity: unexpected expenses and investment losses can bring those on fixed incomes to the brink of financial disaster, he said.

"So many households have to make choices between paying for utilities, paying for housing or putting food on the table," Rodriguez said. "Seniors have perhaps the added expense — 'Do I take care of my prescription drug or health needs?'"

As a result of the escalating problems, senior health and social services agencies have turned their sights to supplying food; likewise, anti-hunger organizations have turned their sights to seniors. But obstacles to those efforts range from budget cuts to seniors' own reluctance to accept help, organizers say.

The Meals on Wheels Association of America delivered 241 million meals nationwide in 2010 with the support of federal funds, but proposed budget cuts to the Older Americans Act could bring that figure down to about 219 million for senior nutrition programs — a reduction of 22 million meals from 2010, said Meals on Wheels spokeswoman Mary McNamara. That's before a proposed 8.2% across-the-board cut via sequestration that organizers estimate could result in the loss of an extra 17 million meals served nationwide.

And last year, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — also known as the food stamp program — in the United States spent $7.4 billion more than it did the year before. A House vote on a farm bill that would cut $16 billion from the program is awaiting a vote after the November elections, legislators say.

the largest economy in the world is imploding right before our eyes....,

economicollapseblog | A devastating economic depression is rapidly spreading across the largest economy in the world.  Unemployment is skyrocketing, money is being pulled out of the banks at an astounding rate, bad debts are everywhere and economic activity is slowing down month after month.  So who am I talking about?  Not the United States - the economy that I am talking about has a GDP that is more than two trillion dollars larger.  It is not China either - the economy that I am talking about is more than twice the size of China.  You have probably guessed it by now - the largest economy in the world is the EU economy.  Things in Europe continue to get even worse.  Greece and Spain are already experiencing full-blown economic depressions that continue to deepen, and Italy and France are headed down the exact same path that Greece and Spain have gone.  Headlines about violent protests and economic despair dominate European newspapers day after day after day.  European leaders hold summit meeting after summit meeting, but all of the "solutions" that get announced never seem to fix anything.  In fact, the largest economy on the planet continues to implode right in front of our eyes, and the economic shockwave from this implosion is going to be felt to the four corners of the earth.

who destroyed the economy: the case against the baby boomers

theatlantic | My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

 This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max, splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but there weren't a lot of jobs."

I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.

Ultimately, members of my father's generation--generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964--are reaping more than they sowed. They graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids. One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the first boomers began working until last year, when they began to cash out their retirement. (The growth trend over the 12 years since I entered the workforce suggests that the Dow will double exactly once before I retire.) They will leave the workforce far wealthier than their parents did, with even more government promises awaiting them. Boomers will be the first generation of retirees to fully enjoy the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; because Social Security payouts rise faster than price inflation, they will draw more-generous retirement benefits than their parents did, in real terms--at their children's expense. The Urban Institute estimated last year that a couple retiring in 2011, having both earned average wages, will accrue about $200,000 more in Medicare and Social Security benefits over their lifetimes than they paid in taxes to support those programs.

Those retirees and near-retirees bequeath a shambles to their offspring. Young people are unemployed at historically high levels. Global competition is stronger than ever, but American institutions have not adapted to prepare new workers for its challenges. Boomers have run up incomes for the very wealthiest Americans, shrunk the middle class, and, via careless borrowing and reckless financial engineering, driven the economy into the worst recession in 80 years. The Pew Research Center reports that middle-class families today are 5 percent less wealthy than their parents were at the same point in their lives, after adjusting for inflation, even though families today are far more likely to include two wage earners. Another Pew report shows that those ages 55 to 64 are 10 percent wealthier today, even after the Great Recession, than Americans of that age bracket were in 1984. Those younger than 35 are 68 percent less wealthy than the same bracket was in 1984.