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Thursday, August 12, 2004 |
Gee, this is what you call a cool clip, straight from the Dutch polders.
10:38:56 PM 
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GlobalResearch: "The Federal Reserve says it is so confident that growth in the US economy is taking firm hold, that it raised its key interest rate from a record low 1% to 1.25% last month, signaling it would slowly bring rates up to "neutral" levels of 3.5-4.5% over coming months.
The problem with this optimistic picture is the fact it is entirely based on the dollar and unprecedented creation of cheap dollar credit by Greenspan and the Bush Administration. Their only short-term goal has been to keep the US economy strong enough to assure re-election for George Bush in November. Washington reports are that Bush made a deal to re-appoint Greenspan on the promise Greenspan would keep the economy growing until the elections. They have done this by a combination of historic low interest rates, rates only seen before in times of war or depression, and by stimulating the economy by record budget deficit spending, issuing government bonds to finance it. The world has been flooded with cheap dollars as a result.
What is clear now is that this unsustainable effort is likely to come to an end sometime in 2005, just after the elections, regardless of who is President.
The world today depends on cheap US dollar credit. When US interest rates are finally forced higher, dramatic shocks will hit Europe, Asia and the entire global economy, unlike any seen since the 1930's. Debts that now appear manageable will suddenly become un-payable. Defaults and bankruptcies will spread as they did in the wake of the 1931 Creditanstalt collapse."
10:09:13 AM
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AP: "The American Bar Association (ABA) criticized what it called 'a widespread pattern of abusive detention methods'. Those abuses, it said, 'feed terrorism by painting the United States as an arrogant nation above the law'."
Protests against government and the Republican convention are increasingly viewed as possible 'terrorism' by police and the Secret Service, which is in fact an abuse of the Patriot Act and other laws, and boils down to a suppression of free speech and dissent, rights and liberties. Trumped-up or exaggerated terror alerts serve to mask the military-style repression.
9:58:16 AM
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