"John Feffer" - Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel. It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.

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"Bob Chapman" - Outsourcing and Offshoring in the Global Economy -- US Corporations Moving to Offshore Tax Havens

By Bob Chapman

Global Research, September 21, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26708

One of the greatest detriments to job creation in the US is the overseas income deferral law. This unbelievable gift to transnational corporations is at the heart of free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing. Presently these corporations are sitting on $2.2 trillion in untaxed profits, which is costing the American taxpayer almost $800 billion in lost tax revenue if like in 2006 they are allowed to bring the funds back at 5-1/4% taxation. Those conglomerates want to bring those funds back into the US tax free, which means $1 trillion in lost taxes, taking advantage of the current financial situation in the US. Five years ago Congress passed legislation allowing $350 billion to be returned to the US at 5-1/4% taxation, not the normal 35%, because these corporations said they would use the funds to create jobs. Very few jobs were created and a large part of the funds were used to purchase company stock, which rose in value, allowing the officers of these corporations to sell stock from options and make billions of dollars in profit for themselves. These are the same corporations that have been responsible for the loss of 11.7 million jobs, the loss of good paying jobs 450,000 American companies and the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue. These corporations are responsible for the heart of American manufacturing being ripped out of America. It over time has spread as well into service and professional industries.

There was a secret meeting on December 24, 2010 with the president in the White House where these pressured Congress and the White House to exempt overseas corporate profits from taxation. It is our opinion that a continuation of such a policy would deprive the US of badly needed taxation. A cessation of present policy would as well help to stem the flow of jobs out of the country. This change would stop the flow of businesses leaving the US and would cause some companies to return to the US.

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"Paul Craig Roberts" - America and Europe, Saving the Rich and Losing the Economy

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, September 25, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26769

Economic policy in the United States and Europe has failed, and people are suffering.
Economic policy failed for three reasons: (1) policymakers focused on enabling offshoring corporations to move middle class jobs, and the consumer demand, tax base, GDP, and careers associated with the jobs, to foreign countries, such as China and India, where labor is inexpensive; (2) policymakers permitted financial deregulation that unleashed fraud and debt leverage on a scale previously unimaginable; (3) policymakers responded to the resulting financial crisis by imposing austerity on the population and running the printing press in order to bail out banks and prevent any losses to the banks regardless of the cost to national economies and innocent parties.
Jobs offshoring was made possible because the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in China and India opening their vast excess supplies of labor to Western exploitation. Pressed by Wall Street for higher profits, US corporations relocated their factories abroad. Foreign labor working with Western capital, technology, and business know-how is just as productive as US labor. However, the excess supplies of labor (and lower living standards) mean that Indian and Chinese labor can be hired for less than labor’s contribution to the value of output. The difference flows into profits, resulting in capital gains for shareholders and performance bonuses for executives.

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"BBC News" - Greece Needs More Cuts Not Higher Taxes, Says IMF

Published on Monday, September 19, 2011 by BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14969034

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has told Greece it needs better tax collection and deeper spending cuts, not higher taxes, to avert its crisis.

The warning comes ahead of Greece's talks with the IMF and European authorities about whether it is doing enough to receive crucial funds.

Greece is trying to persuade them to release the next 8bn-euro (£7bn, $11bn) instalment of its EU-IMF loan.

It needs this money by next month to avoid defaulting on its debt.

The loan comes with the condition that Greece dramatically reduce its deficit, something that it plans to do by cutting the size of the state sector through redundancies, pay cuts and privatisations.

The IMF representative for Greece, Bob Traa, who is in Athens, said this was of crucial importance: "The public sector is very large. Another central element in our view must be to reduce public sector spending.

"This will inevitably require the closure of inefficient state entities as well as reductions in the excessively large public sector workforce and generous public sector wages, which in some cases are above those of the equivalent private sector workers."

Property tax

Greece is also proposing an emergency property tax, to be paid through household energy bills.

However, Mr Traa said this was not a good idea.

"In our view, you should not be drawn to higher and higher taxes on the limited tax base," he said. "This will neither be economically or politically sustainable."

He said a more efficient tax system would be more helpful and called for a "much stronger resolve to tackle the problem of tax evasion".

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"Peter Singer" - Can We Increase Gross National Happiness?

Saturday 17 September 2011

 

by: Peter Singer, Project Syndicate
http://www.truth-out.org/can-we-increase-gross-national-happiness/1316270567

 

Princeton - The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for two things: high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, and its policy of promoting “gross national happiness” instead of economic growth. The two are related: more tourists might boost the economy, but they would damage Bhutan’s environment and culture, and so reduce happiness in the long run.

When I first heard of Bhutan’s goal of maximizing its people’s happiness, I wondered if it really meant anything in practice, or was just another political slogan. Last month, when I was in the capital, Thimphu, to speak at a conference on “Economic Development and Happiness,” organized by Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley and co-hosted by Jeffrey Sachs [5], Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [6], I learned that it is much more than a slogan.

Never before have I been at a conference that was taken so seriously by a national government. I had expected Thinley to open the conference with a formal welcome, and then return to his office. Instead, his address was a thoughtful review of the key issues involved in promoting happiness as a national policy. He then stayed at the conference for the entire two and a half days, and made pertinent contributions to our discussions. At most sessions, several cabinet ministers were also present.

Since ancient times, happiness has been universally seen as a good. Problems arise when we try to agree on a definition of happiness, and to measure it.

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"Will Hutton" - Our Capitalist System Is Near Meltdown

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/euro-crisis-recession-europe
Published on Sunday, September 18, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

The Ailing Euro Is Part of a Wider Crisis. A 1930s-style crash threatens us and our financial partners. Collective action is the only solution

by Will Hutton

Eighty years ago, faced with today's economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practiced for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognized, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster.

Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimize the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practiced, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.

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"Mike Davis"- What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall

Posted on September 13, 2011, Printed on September 13, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175440/

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world.  There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

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"Mike Whitney"- Eurozone At Death’s Door

Counterpunch.org  September 12, 2011

“After almost two years of fighting to contain the region’s debt crisis and providing the biggest share of three European bailouts, Chancellor Angela Merkel is laying the ground for what markets say is almost a sure thing: a Greek default.”

– Bloomberg News

Greece is hurtling towards default and the doomsday scenario is beginning to unfold. The IMF, the G-7, and the ECB have all swung into full-crisis mode and are prepared to do whatever they can to minimize the collateral damage. But the shock to the financial system and the fragile recovery is bound to be substantial. A default would have dire knock-on effects for banks in Germany, France and the UK that are presently holding billions in Greek debt. Many of them will face excruciating restructuring or, perhaps, bankruptcy. And the banks and financial institutions in the US aren’t off the hook either, not by a long shot. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

“……a European failure is bound to have huge ramifications for U.S. and global financial markets. If there is any doubt on this score, all one need do is consider the U.S. financial system’s massive exposure to European banks. In a recent survey, Fitch Ratings Inc. found that, as of the end of July, the U.S. money-market industry still had over a trillion dollars of direct exposure to European banks—or roughly 45% of money markets’ overall assets. The Bank for International Settlement reports that American banks have loan exposure to German and French banks of more than $1.2 trillion.

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"Paul Krugman"- An Impeccable Disaster

September 11, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/opinion/an-impeccable-disaster.html

On Thursday Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank or E.C.B. — Europe’s equivalent to Ben Bernanke — lost his sang-froid. In response to a question about whether the E.C.B. is becoming a “bad bank” thanks to its purchases of troubled nations’ debt, Mr. Trichet, his voice rising, insisted that his institution has performed “impeccably, impeccably!” as a guardian of price stability.

Indeed it has. And that’s why the euro is now at risk of collapse.

Financial turmoil in Europe is no longer a problem of small, peripheral economies like Greece. What’s under way right now is a full-scale market run on the much larger economies of Spain and Italy. At this point countries in crisis account for about a third of the euro area’s G.D.P., so the common European currency itself is under existential threat.

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"Mike Whitney"- Europe's "Troubled Assets" Bank Bailout, Germany's Chancellor Merkel Pushes for a Eurozone "Banktatorship"

Global Research, September 5, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26397

The Bundestag will have one chance to stop Angela Merkel's plan to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to underwater EU banks that made bad bets on sovereign bonds. If the German parliament fails to block Merkel on September 23,  then--under the "expanded powers" of the European Financial Security Facility (EFSF)-- insolvent banks will be bailed out and the costs will be passed on to eurozone taxpayers.  
 
Despite her populist bloviating ("We won't be bullied by the markets"), Merkel is a devout Europhile committed to a fiscal union ruled by bankers and bondholders, a Banktatorship. Presently, she is doing whatever she can to hurry the process along before hostile bond vigilantes roil the markets and bring the EU banking system crashing down. This is from Der Spiegel: 
 
 "In a situation of market panic, the EFSF has to act quickly," Holger Schmieding, chief economist of Berenberg Bank, told the Financial Times Deutschland. "It could happen overnight or on a weekend." Guntram Wolff of the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel agreed. Parliamentary approval "must not take too long." ("Parliamentary Influence over Euro Bailouts 'Naive'", Der Spiegel)

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