Reed And Ink

I have a mind, an ADD one at that, to mimic Jackie Harvey’s style. Much easier than discursion.

Aye, it is difficult to concentrate with the World Cup in swing now. Perhaps this will be less disjointed than my previous entry, but perhaps not. That said, as always there are interesting developments afoot on the world stage, apart from the greatest event of the greatest sport ever. (Again, dissent is healthy, as Pepe Escobar shows.)

Following on the theme of austerity… UK Prime Minister Cameron’s announcement came just after Bilderberg ends. Hmm. And to think that all those so-called “conspiracy theorists” are loony, who for far longer have been carping on this theme than the anemically servile mainstream media only now taking things seriously. But, you know, there’s always the key “news” that Scarlett Johansson has a new hairdo. That’s not even entertaining.

Choice excerpts from a post on Rick Ackerman’s site:

David Cameron’s new Government in Britain announced Tuesday that it will introduce austerity measures to begin paying down the estimated one trillion (U.S. value) in debts held by the British Government. Let’s let that sink in for a moment, for it is a stunning announcement. Now repeat it: Britain will introduce austerity measures in order to eliminate the deficit and begin paying down the national debt. And that being said, we have just received the signal to an end to global stimulus measures — one that puts a nail in the coffin of the debate on whether or not Britain would “print” her way out of the debt crisis. That would have virtually guaranteed an eventual hyperinflation that would have spread to all Western nations, destroying the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency in the process and ending several hundred years of Western economic dominance.

Hyperinflation would also destroy the central bankers’ power, which I think is the real meaning of the fear in “ending several hundred years of Western economic dominance.” They are not easily giving up their monetary power to “politicized” institutions such as, er, Congress. The fine art of dissembling, indeed, although I do appreciate the buried discussion by Fisher that

We cannot count forever on the largess or the misfortune of others to mask our own imbalances here at home—for fiscal profligacy in Washington today hinders our ability to address fiscal challenges tomorrow.

These challenges are coming. Off balance sheet, there lie two massive, unfunded liabilities not accounted for in the “conventional budget accounting” of the federal government—most significantly, Social Security and the government obligations of current Medicare programs.

Pundits and analysts like to focus on the year in which Social Security will go permanently into the red on an annual cash flow basis—which recently was projected to occur in 2019 but could occur as early as 2016. But they largely ignore the severity of the broader problem: accumulated entitlement debt over the infinite horizon. According to our calculations at the Dallas Fed, that unfunded debt of Social Security and Medicare combined has now reached $104 trillion—trillion with a ‘T’—in discounted present value. And while much attention in recent years has been devoted to Social Security, the lion’s share of the total entitlement shortfall (nearly $90 trillion) actually comes from Medicare. This is a prodigious number. Others—like Pete Peterson’s foundation, which uses a different time horizon in its methodology—calculate the unfunded liability at north of $40 trillion, growing by a sum of $2 trillion to $3 trillion per year. No matter. The problem is frightful, whether you take his numbers or ours.

Back to Ackerman:

Hardest hit will be major exporting nations like China and India who depend on Europe and the Americas for their bread-and-butter income. Aid programs to the Third world will be gutted, and I cannot yet imagine the consequences that will bring to the poorest people on earth.

Following a Google search for the Wizard of the Baca Grande, what if that be The Plan? Let’s take it to be fiction, for now, and we can admittedly find such a story compelling…

Here is how writer Daniel Wood describes a ride and conversation with Maurice Strong when visiting the ruggedly attractive Baca Grande ranch:

“I leave the Baca with Strong, retracing our route of a week earlier. We pass the Lazy U Ranch and turn South on Highway 17. Strong tells me he has often wished he could write. He has a novel he’d like to do. It’s something he has been thinking about for a decade. It would be a cautionary tale about the future.

‘Each year,’ he explains as background to the telling of the novel’s plot, ‘the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEO’S, prime ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead.’

With this as a setting, he then says, ‘What if a small group of these world leaders were to form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse? It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders.’

‘They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered a panic, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can’t close. The rich countries’ and Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window.

I sat there spellbound. This is not any storyteller talking. This is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.

‘I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this,’ he says.” (West Magazine, May 1990)