Voice in the Wilderness

The federal government is ignoring what very well may be the next “true” pandemic this country may face. The dairy industry is the carrier of the disease and the USDA and FDA are fully aware of the impending disaster but will take no action to prevent exposure to the population. The name of the disease is Johne’s (pronounced “Yo-nees”).
What is this impending disease and why should this concern us? Johne’s (pronounced “Yo-nees”) disease is a chronic, contagious bacterial disease that affects the small intestine of ruminants such as cattle, sheep, goats, deer, antelope and bison. All ruminants are susceptible to Johne’s disease. (http://johnesdisease.org/) The disease is incurable and related to the human version of Crohn’s disease. The human version is similar in its form causing an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). It can lead to abdominal pain, severe diarrhea and malnutrition. There is no known cause for either disease.
How is the US Government complicit in the possible spread of this disease one may ask? The USDA and FDA are completely aware of the condition in the dairy industry. They are also aware of the relation between the bovine infestation and its ability to transmit to humans. The solution the government has chosen is not eradication of the infected herds but irradiation of milk products. The argument for irradiation is the premise that irradiating the milk will kill the infection. The infection lives in the fecal matter and irradiation does not remove the fecal matter from the milk. It is still present in every glass someone drinks from a production farm. If someone handed you a spoon of irradiated manure and told you it was safe to eat I doubt one would take a bite. Why do we accept this in our milk? The government accepts this level of contamination in milk and has no intention of intervening.
Many will question how wide-spread the contamination is in the dairy industry and does this really need to be a concern. In the U.S. it is estimated that 7.8% of the beef herds and 22% of the dairy herds are infected with M. paratuberculosis. Infection rates in cattle in other countries are generally similar. (http://www.johnes.org/general/faqs.html#4) This is a low estimate by some accounts. The problem in the dairy industry is not simply how many cattle have the disease. Even if it one agrees the infection rate is only 22% the problem is greater than it appears. The milk from the infected 22% is mixed in the same container as the uninfected cattle. Outcome, 100% of the milk is infected at this stage and irradiation is the accepted remedy. My original question remains, care for a spoon of manure? The government tells us it is safe.
The dairy industry continues to milk the infected dairy cattle and has no motivation to stop. Why? The government regulations do not prohibit them from using these cattle until they die from the disease. It is financially in their interest to keep these cattle than culling and replacing the herd. Remember, there is no cure. The only way to eliminate the disease from a herd is elimination of all infected cattle and equipment. The disease lives in the manure and any equipment is contacts becomes contaminated and a carrier.
The element of our society who should be the impetus to stop this infection is absent. The press is not concerned because it does not fit in their agenda. They should be at the forefront of identifying this impending crisis and highlighting it to the populace. The problem is they no longer do investigative reporting. The press has become complacent and waits for the government to hand them “news” stories. No wonder they are failing, people do not trust them any longer and for good reason. If they attacked this story they would go up against large conglomerations, the federal government, including the senators and representatives who have interests in their districts to keep the current system in place.
I am a free market advocate who believes in minimal government. The free market would correct itself because consumers would demand a change to operational procedure. The problem is the failure of the press to highlight the contamination of our milk supply. They will not do this while they are lapdogs of a burgeoning federal government. This is why the founders warned against such a strong central government. We are now bound to them as an agent to protect the food supply and they no longer care. They are more concerned with creating a larger, more centralized government in their zeal to control our lives.
What can you do about this problem? The federal government will not help you. Stop buying milk from any supplier who does not certify their milk as contamination free. If you can raise a cow or goat, than do so to protect your family. Choose an alternative to dairy if possible, soy milk or some other product. The federal government will tell us there is no known connection between the dairy and human version. How much do you trust the government? Go on; take a bite of that spoon.

Jan 12th, 2010 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Economics, Featured
The economy has about six months to live. Especially the part that consists of swapping paper certificates. That’s the buzz I’ve gotten the first two weeks of 2010, and forgive me for not presenting a sheaf of charts and graphs to make the case. Just about everybody else yakking about these thing on the Web provides plenty of statistical analysis: Mish, The Automatic Earth, Chris Martenson, Zero Hedge, The Baseline Scenario… They’re all well worth visiting.

Bank bonus numbers are due out any day now. The revolt that I expected around the release of these numbers may come from a different place than I had imagined earlier — not from whatever remains of “normal” working people, but from the thought leaders and middling agents in administration (including the prosecutors) who, for one reason or another, have been diverting their attention, or watching and waiting, or making excuses for a couple of years now. When Frank Rich of The New York Times starts Calling for Robert Rubin’s Head, then maybe the great groaning tramp steamer of media opinion is turning in the water and charting a new course for the port of reality.

Anyway, the grotesque carnival of rackets and lies that the US economy has become — held together with the duct tape of stimulus cash, gamed accounting, mortgage subsidies, carry trades, TBTF bailouts, TARPS, TALFS, shell-game BLS reports, and MSNBC “green shoots” cheerleading — gives every sign of tipping into collapse at a moment’s notice. There are just too many obvious things that can go wrong, and that means there are many less obvious, hidden things that can go wrong, and isn’t it tragically foolish to tempt Murphy’s Law, since it operates so well without any help from us? The call is even going out lately for criminal prosecution of the current Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, for Engineering AIG’S $14 Billion Credit Default Swap Payoff to Goldman Sachs as part of the AIG bailout. Okay then, why not Paulson, Bernanke, Blankfein…?

But the other rings of the circus are fully occupied by clowns and dancing bears, too. Even with sketchy-looking stock market prospects for 2010, it’s hard to explain why the world would run into US treasury bonds, especially a few months from now, after the initial rush-to-safety — that is, when you could just as easily buy Canadian or Swiss franc denominated short-term bills. And then what happens when the Federal Reserve has to eat all the uneaten treasuries, while it’s already choking to death on collateralized debt obligations and related worthless toxic trash securities? After all, the greenbacks we swap around are called Federal Reserve Notes.

Why would anybody think that the housing market is going to keep levitating? A big fat “pig” of adjustable rate mortgages (i.e. mortgages that will never be “serviced”) is about to move through the “python” of the housing scene, shoving millions more households into default and foreclosure. Meanwhile, local and regional banks are choking on real estate already in default that they are afraid to foreclose on and have been keeping off the market through 2009 in order to not send the price of houses down further and put even more households “under water” for houses worth much less than the face value of their mortgage. I doubt that the banks are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but whatever the motive, this racket of just sucking up bad loans can’t go on forever. At some point, a banking system has to be based on credibility, on loans actually being paid back, or it will break, and we are close to the breaking point.

The pathetic truth at the center of the housing fiasco is that prices have to come down further if any normal wage-earner will ever afford to buy a house again in America on anything like normal terms. Anyway, sooner or later the banking system is going to have to upchuck the “phantom inventory” of un-foreclosed-on houses, and sell them off for whatever they can get, or else a lot of banks are going to go out of business.

They may go down anyway, because the catastrophe of commercial real estate is following right on the heels of the fiasco in residential real estate. The vast oversupply of malls, strip malls, office parks, and other furnishings of the expiring “consumer” economy is about to become the biggest liability that any economy in world history has ever seen. Who will even want to buy these absurd properties cheaply, when they will never find any retail tenants for the badly-built structures, nor be able to keep up with the maintenance (think: leaking flat roofs), or retrofit them for anything? In a really sane world, a lot of these buildings would go straight to demolition-and-salvage — except that it costs money to do that, and who exactly right now will make a market for used cinder blocks and aluminum window sashes? I expect these places to become squats for the desperate homeless.

Then there are the bankrupt states, led by the biggest, of course — California and New York — but with plenty more right behind, whirling around the same drain (probably forty-nine of them with the exception of that fiscal Nirvana, North Dakota!). Even if they manage to con bailouts from the bailout-weary federal government, the states are still going to have to winnow down the ranks of their public employees (throwing more middle-class households into foreclosure and penury), while they hugely reduce public services, especially to the poor, the unwell, and the unable. That alone will redound into very visible realms of daily life from public safety (rising crime) to the decay of roads and bridges.

Perhaps the most troubling buzz in the air this first month of 2010 are rumors of coming food shortages due to widespread crop failures around the world in the harvest seasons of 2009 (Emergency Food Supply, Food Crisis for Dummies, 2010 Wall Street Predictions). If the US Department of Agriculture hasn’t flat-out lied about crop numbers in 2009, the signs are that their statistical reports are at least inconsistent with real grain storage numbers and commodities prices. And why would the USDA tell the truth if every other federal agency is reporting gamed numbers? Given the crisis in capital and lending, one also has to wonder how farmers will be able to borrow money to get their crops in this year.

Finally there’s the global energy scene. The price of oil starts this week over $83 a barrel. That puts it about $1.50 from the price “danger zone” where it begins to kill economic activity in the USA. Things and procedures just start to cost too much. Gasoline. Deisel fuel (and, by the way, that means another problem for food production going into the 2010 planting season). One especially eerie situation the past few weeks has been the de-coupling of moves upward in oil from moves in the value of the dollar. Lately, oil has been going up whether or not the dollar has gone up or down. Two weeks ago the dollar went below 1.42 against the Euro and today it’s above 1.45, and oil has been rising steadily from the mid $70 range all the while. 2010 may be the year that we conclusively realize that world oil demand exceeds world oil supply — and that global oil production cannot hold above 85 million barrels-a-day no matter what we do.

These are the things that trouble my mind at three o’clock in the morning when the wind rises and things bang around spookily. Gird your loins out there for a savage season or two.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler

January 12, 2010

In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. While Great Britain’s maritime power and its far-flung empire had propelled it to a dominant position among the world’s industrialized nations, only the United States challenged Argentina for the position of the world’s second-most powerful economy.

It was blessed with abundant agriculture, vast swaths of rich farmland laced with navigable rivers and an accessible port system. Its level of industrialization was higher than many European countries: railroads, automobiles and telephones were commonplace.

In 1916, a new president was elected. Hipólito Irigoyen had formed a party called The Radicals under the banner of “fundamental change” with an appeal to the middle class.

Among Irigoyen’s changes: mandatory pension insurance, mandatory health insurance, and support for low-income housing construction to stimulate the economy. Put simply, the state assumed economic control of a vast swath of the country’s operations and began assessing new payroll taxes to fund its efforts.

With an increasing flow of funds into these entitlement programs, the government’s payouts soon became overly generous. Before long its outlays surpassed the value of the taxpayers’ contributions. Put simply, it quickly became under-funded, much like the United States’ Social Security and Medicare programs.

The death knell for the Argentine economy, however, came with the election of Juan Perón. Perón had a fascist and corporatist upbringing; he and his charismatic wife aimed their populist rhetoric at the nation’s rich.

This targeted group “swiftly expanded to cover most of the propertied middle classes, who became an enemy to be defeated and humiliated.”

Under Perón, the size of government bureaucracies exploded through massive programs of social spending and by encouraging the growth of labor unions.

High taxes and economic mismanagement took their inevitable toll even after Perón had been driven from office. But his populist rhetoric and “contempt for economic realities” lived on. Argentina’s federal government continued to spend far beyond its means.

Hyperinflation exploded in 1989, the final stage of a process characterized by “industrial protectionism, redistribution of income based on increased wages, and growing state intervention in the economy…”

The Argentinian government’s practice of printing money to pay off its public debts had crushed the economy. Inflation hit 3000%, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic. Food riots were rampant; stores were looted; the country descended into chaos.

And by 1994, Argentina’s public pensions — the equivalent of Social Security — had imploded. The payroll tax had increased from 5% to 26%, but it wasn’t enough. In addition, Argentina had implemented a value-added tax (VAT), new income taxes, a personal tax on wealth, and additional revenues based upon the sale of public enterprises. These crushed the private sector, further damaging the economy.

A government-controlled “privatization” effort to rescue seniors’ pensions was attempted. But, by 2001, those funds had also been raided by the government, the monies replaced by Argentina’s defaulted government bonds.

By 2002, “…government fiscal irresponsibility… induced a national economic crisis as severe as America’s Great Depression.”

* * *

In 1902 Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries. Little more than a hundred years later, it is poverty-stricken, struggling to meet its debt obligations amidst a drought.

We’ve seen this movie before. The Democrats’ populist plans can’t possibly work, because government bankrupts everything it touches. History teaches us that ObamaCare and unfunded entitlement programs will be utter, complete disasters.

Today’s Democrats are guilty of more than stupidity; they are enslaving future generations to poverty and misery. And they will be long gone when it all implodes. They will be as cold and dead as Juan Perón when the piper must ultimately be paid.

References: A tear for Argentina’s pension funds; Inflation in Argentina; The United States of Argentina.

© 2010

“Welcome to the Friendly Skies. Now take off all your clothes.”

Don’t laugh! In the wake of the failed terrorist attempt over Detroit on Christmas Day, it may not be long before those scary words greet you upon arriving at the airport, just before you step into the full-body scan machine.

Today, there are only 40 such machines located, and rarely used, in 19 airports across the country. But, spending $25 million in stimulus funds, the Transportation Security Administration has already ordered an additional 150 for 2010, and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Once those scanners are in place, every passenger will be required to pass through one or volunteer to be personally groped in a full-body pat down.

There’s no doubt about it; full-body scanners are a gross and unnecessary invasion of privacy. By stepping into that machine, you might as well take your clothes off and parade naked around the security checkpoint.

TSA officials haughtily pooh-pooh privacy concerns. After all, they reassure us, the agent leering at your naked body is hidden away, out of sight, in a room nearby. So what? He’s still leering at your body. Or your wife’s. Or your daughter’s. In fact, in England, use of full-body scanners is considered a violation of child pornography laws, and the machines are banned for children under 18.

Not only that, adds TSA, rules prohibit agents from storing naked images of passengers or sharing them with friends. Oh, really. After their recent screw-ups in Detroit or Newark, can we really trust TSA on anything?

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Jan 7th, 2010 | By Wayne Allyn Root | Category: Featured, Macro Economics, Politics
You can usually count on Time magazine to get things backwards, and they missed in a big way with their selection of Ben Bernanke as “Person of the Year” for 2009. Bankster Ben was wrong, wrong, and wrong again in his Federal Reserve policies and prognostications, with the result being runaway debt, endless deficits, and a financial industry scam machine that is rapidly reaching its proper status as laughingstock of the planet. Bernanke was not the first Fed Chairman to get a big boost from Time; Alan Greenspan once graced Time’s cover (flanked by Larry Summers and Robert Rubin) with the three of them touted as “The Committee to Save the World.” Well of course we know where that led; those three contributed to the destruction of the world’s economy. But that’s par for the course. The people writing the news love to predict and make the news. Unfortunately their predictions are almost always wrong. That could be why most mainstream media corporations in this country are now on the verge of bankruptcy. It appears that the same media “experts” who make terrible predictions, aren’t any better at running a business. One thing’s for sure: the dying Time magazine loves its bankers.

But just days ago, the Petersen/Pew Commission on Budget Reform warned in a new report that “over the past year alone, the public debt of the United States rose sharply from 41 to 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Under reasonable assumptions, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent by 2038.”

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