[Social Contract] The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits | There is No Global Population Problem: Don't Globalize, Local Problems: Relocalize!?

The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits

by Garrett Hardin | The Social Contract

For a few decades after the publication of Malthus’s celebrated essay in 1798, population was much discussed in England; then at about the middle of the 19th century it became overshadowed by more narrowly economic problems. In the 20th century Malthus has, so to speak, been buried every year by his commentators —only to be dug up again the following year.

Exactly why Malthus is so often repudiated is not clear because the funeral orations typically amount to little more than one brutal word: Discredited! Reviewing many criticisms I have come to the conclusion that a single paragraph in Malthus accounts for much of the rejectors' passion. The offending passage occurs only in the second edition of his essay. Had Malthus retained this paragraph and justified it adequately in subsequent editions I think we would have been spared nearly two hundred years of unproductive brawling. As I see it, Malthus walked right past the heart of the population problem. In presenting my conclusions I shall follow the advice of the physicist George Uhlenbeck (1900-1988), who said: "First tell us what the problem is; then state your conclusions at once. Only thereafter should you go into details…"1

The problem is simply this: can the necessity of population control be reconciled with the apparent demands of individualism, as that complex concept has developed since John Locke? I conclude that there is a fatal contradiction between these two necessities; and that the survival of civilization will require us to modify significantly the powers we now grant to individual "rights." This social revolution will be painful, but it cannot, I think, be successfully evaded.

SA's Largest Ponzi Scheme Uncovered: Hundreds of Greedy Investors Conned with False Promises || Financial Armageddon: Frauds, Old and New

SA's Largest Ponzi scheme uncovered

Hundreds of investors stand to lose millions as SSG helps investigate false promises.

The Frankel Investment Scheme operates as an importer and exporter of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) from foreign countries. These ingredients are used by manufacturers of generic medicines and a large part of the API's are used in the manufacturing of the anti retroviral drug prescribed to people who were exposed to or contracted the HIV/Aids virus.

Founder of this scheme, Barry Tannenbaum is the son of a founding shareholder of Adcock Ingram and has a bachelors degree in science. Tannenbaum promoted his concept to investors claiming massive returns on investments. Tannenbaum supported his proposition by showing prospects purchase orders from major pharmaceutical companies such as Adcock Ingram, Aspen and Novartis for the respective API's valued in the many millions.

Another 'dramatis personae' in this scheme is Dean Rees. Rees is a well known attorney and his personal bank accounts were often used for investors to deposit their money into. When an attorney and investor from Routlidge Modise called a meeting for all investors last week, Rees, like a knight in shining armour, undertook to act as the legal representative for the investors. Rees also explained that he is Chief Operating Officer (COO), acting on behalf of the whole Frankel Group. However early in June Rees wrote a letter stating that he had been revoked as COO. Worried investors cross questioned Rees at the meeting and he explained that he had no part in the alleged fraudulent transactions and stands to lose all his investments just like everybody else.

Austrian Economist Peter Schiff Was Right || Peter Schiff: “Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One!”

Austrian Economist Peter Schiff Was Right

Clips from 2006 - 2007 Predicting Current Economic Events

Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One

Mises Daily by Peter Schiff

Posted on 6/12/2009 12:00:00 AM

[Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference, March 13, 2009. An MP3 audio version of this lecture is available for download. You can also watch the video. Transcript provided by Jennifer Lewis.]


Introduction by Joseph Salerno

It is my great and distinct pleasure to introduce the Henry Hazlitt Lecturer, Peter Schiff.

Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, is familiar to everyone who has watched financial coverage in the last year. He is famed for being the most vocal financial economist to have perfectly predicted the crash.

Financial Warfare Trifecta: Population, Resources & Information:: 400 Millionaires Defrauded || Humanity: Need a Moral Bailout || The 50th Law

400 Millionaires Defrauded

SA PIG | Noseweek

Noseweek.co.za Editor Martin Welz says their information shows that some 400 millionaires invested an estimated R2-billion and speculation that sums of up to R15bn are involved (gone up in such a short space of time?) with businessman Barry Tannenbaum, with the promise of great returns.

Barry Tannenbaum, a grandson of one of the co-founders of Adcock Ingram, together with Johannesburg attorneys Dean Rees and Daryl Leigh, have been running a pyramid scheme promising massive returns on investments. Investors were told they would score between 15 and 20 percent in three months, and their money would be used to finance the import of chemicals which, among other things, were required for antiretroviral medicines for the treatment of HIV and Aids.

BARRY TANNENBAUM TAKES S.A. MILLIONAIRES FOR A R15 BILLION PONZI IN THE PARK

On Friday last week Johannesburg businessman Christopher Leppan applied to the Johannesburg High Court to have Barry Deon Tannenbaum, until recently of Rivonia, declared bankrupt.

Barry is the famously pious son of Harold Tannenbaum, mega-rich founder of Adcock Ingram, South Africa's second-largest pharmaceutical company.

Return of the Population Time-Bomb || Too many People: Earth's Population Problem

Return of the population timebomb

It has become taboo over recent years, but population, not consumption, really is the key to managing our use of the world's resources

John Feeney | guardian.co.uk

Monday, 5 May 2008

Only since 1800, in the last 0.1% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.

Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person's consumption.

Today's crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in "overshoot" of Earth's "carrying capacity" for humans, our demand exceeding the planet's absorptive and regenerative capacities.

To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce both factors in the equation: our numbers and per person consumption.

The Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Withdraw Nobel Peace Prize’s from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.....

Overview of Documentation

1. Letter to Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Notice of Legal and Political Request to: (I) Withdraw Nobel Peace Prize’s from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for (a) Intellectual Dishonesty & Hypocrisy; (b) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (c) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal; and (II) Accept Nobel Peace Prize Nominations for Dr. Albert Bartlett; Dr. Garret James Harden, and Dr. M. King Hubbert, for Intellectually Honest and Politically Honourable Ecologically Sustainable, Human Rights, Peace and Social Justice Advocacy. [PDF:200KB][Verbatim Text of Emails, Delivery & Read Receipts from Nobel Institute, NSA & Royal Norwegian Embassy, Pretoria (PDF:174KB)]
   [Act4 ♥ TrinityLove EcoFamily ♥ :: Sign the HARTSSTARH Legal and Political Petition to the Nobel Institute]
   
   
2. Letter to Proudly South African/TRC-RSA Nobel Peace Prize Recipients: Former President Nelson Mandela, Former President F.W. de Klerk, Archbhishop Desmond Tutu; sent c/o and via: Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Final Honourable Notice of Legal and Political Delivery: Elimination of ‘TRC-RSA’ Nobel Peace Prize Recipients Plausible Deniability, to allegations that your Human Rights Advocacy is guilty of (i) Intellectual Dishonesty and Hypocrisy; (ii) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (iii) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal. [PDF:200KB] ][Verbatim Text of Emails, Delivery & Read Receipts from Tony Leon and Prof. van der Elst (PDF:174KB)]
   

Financial Relocalisation: Direct Way to Fix Credit Crisis | N. Dakota's State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street

Credit Where Credit is Due: Direct Way to Fix Credit Crisis

Ellen Brown | Web of Debt

January 11, 2009

Letter to the bank –

Dear Sirs, In light of recent developments, when you returned my check marked “insufficient funds,” were you referring to my funds or yours?

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously said, “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.” If banks can create money, why are we suffering from a “credit crunch”? Why can’t banks create all the money they can find borrowers for? Last fall, Congress committed an unprecedented $700 billion in taxpayer money to reversing the credit crisis, and the Federal Reserve has already fanned that into $8.5 trillion in loans and commitments.1 But the bank bailout has proven to be no more than a boondoggle for a handful of lucky Wall Street banks, without getting credit flowing again.

To understand the real cause of the credit crisis and how it can be reversed, we first need to understand credit itself – what it is, where it comes from, and what the real tourniquet is that has limited its flow. Banks actually create credit; and if private banks can do it, so could public banks or public treasuries. The crisis is not one of “liquidity” but of “solvency.” It has been caused, not by the banks’ inability to get credit (something they can create with accounting entries), but by their inability to meet the capital requirement imposed by the Bank for International Settlements, the private foreign head of the international banking system. That inability, in turn, has been caused by the derivatives virus; and only a few big banks are seriously infected with it. By bailing out these big banks, the government is actually spreading the virus by furnishing the funds for them to take over smaller regional banks.

Weimar HyperInflation: Time to Get Out the Wheelbarrows? || Economic crisis spurs spike in 'suburban survivalists'

Weimar HyperInflation: Time to Get Out the Wheelbarrows?

Ellen Brown | Web of Debt

May 19th, 2009

“It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty.You could buy nothing with your paper money.

– Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler on on the Weimar Republic hyperinflation (1993 interview)

Some worried commentators are predicting a massive hyperinflation of the sort suffered by Weimar Germany in 1923, when a wheelbarrow full of paper money could barely buy a loaf of bread. An April 29 editorial in the San Francisco Examiner warned:

“With an unprecedented deficit that’s approaching $2 trillion, [the President’s 2010] budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic.”1

In an investment newsletter called Money Morning on April 9, Martin Hutchinson pointed to disturbing parallels between current government monetary policy and Weimar Germany’s, when 50% of government spending was being funded by seigniorage – merely printing money.2 However, there is something puzzling in his data. He indicates that the British government is already funding more of its budget by seigniorage than Weimar Germany did at the height of its massive hyperinflation; yet the pound is still holding its own, under circumstances said to have caused the complete destruction of the German mark. Something else must have been responsible for the mark’s collapse besides mere money-printing to meet the government’s budget, but what? And are we threatened by the same risk today? Let’s take a closer look at the data.

Jim Kunstler's GeoPolitics 101 Forecast 2009 || Exponential Fiat Currency: The Dangers of Printing Money

Jim Kunstler's GeoPolitics 101 Forecast 2009

ClusterFuck Nation

Introduction

There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume in "growth" mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament -- through "innovation," through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via "drill, baby, drill" policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current "rough patch" into a vibrant re-energized era of "green" Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can't be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

Class of ‘09: You’re Screwed || Got Work?: College Graduates Face Toughest Job Market in Years

Class of ‘09: You’re Screwed


Bill Bonner | Daily Reckoning

05/29/09 London, England Last weekend, we journeyed to Boston to attend a college graduation. Thousands of callow scholars were on display. Each was handed his papers…and then marched out of the hockey stadium. To the tune of ‘Pomp & Circumstance,’ wearing a long, red robe, he entered the outside world solemnly…like a patsy joining a poker game.

So far, not a single major university has asked us to make the commencement address. Nor a minor college. Not even a school of cosmetology or taxidermy. But here at the Daily Reckoning headquarters in London, protected by a broad ocean and a narrow reading of the First Amendment, we will give them – and UK graduates too – advice no one asked for.

“Plastics,” was the advice given to college graduates in Mike Nichols’ ’67 film. But that was when there was still hope for America’s manufacturing sector. Even then, it was too late. The percentage of GDP from the manufacturing sector fell for the next four decades, from over 20% in the last ’60s to barely 12% last year. Better advice would have been ‘derivatives.’ They stank just as bad, but they were much more profitable. While only 8% of GDP, finance accounted for 40% of corporate profits in 2007. And derivatives grew from nothing to a face value of 16 times the GDP of the entire planet.

But your elders are always giving you bum advice.

Chavez Jokes He Is More Right-Wing Than 'Comrade' Obama || What I Learned as Romania's 'Comrade' Car Czar

Chavez Jokes He Is More Right-Wing Than 'Comrade' Obama

Texas Fred | Fox News

Thursday, June 04, 2009

President Hugo Chavez claimed this week that he and his Cuban ally Fidel Castro are more conservative than left-wing U.S. President Barack Obama, referring to the American government bailout and takeover of General Motors, Reuters reported.

The Venezuelan leader was giving a speech on the "curse" of capitalism on Tuesday as GM was filing for bankruptcy and preparing for Washington to take control of 60 percent of the 100-year-old symbol of American capitalism.

"Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right," Reuters quotes Chavez joking on a national TV broadcast.

Socialist Chavez has nationalized most of Venezuela's economic sectors, including many oil projects that include joint ventures with private companies that give his government a 60 percent stake.

Obama says he will quickly sell off GM, but for now the government controls the automaker and has injected $30 billion of taxpayer money into the company.

Chavez also on Tuesday accused the CIA of plotting to kill him.

Chavez has previously accused the U.S. of plotting to overthrow him or invade Venezuela, but Tuesday was the first time he has made such accusations since warmly greeting President Barack Obama at an April summit in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ten $$ Things To Do! || Lessons of the Global Financial Crisis: 1. End of Ponzi Prosperity; 2. Whatever it Takes! 3. Built to Fail!

Ten Things You Must Do!!

Karls Market Ticker! (Excerpt)

Don't say you weren't warned.

So without further adieu, here's my list of 10 things you need to be doing now:

1. Stop listening to those who claim that "The Market is telling you the recession is ending/over." Baloney. What was the market telling you in October of 2007 when the SPX hit 1576? That everything was great and "subprime was contained", right? Any more questions on that piece of nonsense?
   
   
2. Get out of debt - NOW. Revolving debt in particular is murderous. If your credit line hasn't been cut back or your interest rate jacked, you're one of the few. It will happen. Going bankrupt due to increasing debt service requirements (with or without job loss) sucks.
   
   
3. Stop spending more than you make - in fact, do the opposite - start saving. NOW. You need to be saving 10% of your gross income. Not net or "excess" - gross. These funds serve two purposes: an emergency fund (which you're likely to need) and if you have one already it will also serve as a fund to buy up assets that will be puked up when things get really bad. You don't get wealthy by selling to some other sucker - you get wealthy by buying when nobody has any money to buy - that is, by driving the hardest bargain you can imagine!
   
   
4. I've said it before but it bears repeating: have the ability to make it even if you lose your job. Most people say three months of reserves are necessary. I've said six months to two years, and I'll reiterate it. And reserves means cash, not credit. Parked in a credit union is ok - but be prepared to make that actual cash in a big honking hurry if you need to. How do you know if you need to? If and when the first Treasury auction fails, the market crashes below the 666 March low and/or a big bank fails, you need to.
   

American capitalism whimpers || 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years || Objectivism: Bridging Liberal Conservative Environment Divide

American capitalism gone with a whimper

By Stanislav Mishin | Pravda.Ru

4-27-2009

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights.

Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

The Population Elephant: The Problems with “The Problem”

Ten Best Population Quotes, from The Population Elephant

Climate change, energy depletion, food shortages,
resource wars, species extinction - these are not
the problem, they are only the symptoms. The
singular root problem that causes all these
horrifying threats to mankind is overpopulation.


So - logically - the solution that will eliminate
these threats is simply to reduce the population of
humans on this planet to a sustainable number.


Yet, no one proposes this obvious solution. No
one is even willing to discuss it.


It is the Elephant in every room.


Except here.

Austrian Economics :: The Austrian School & the Meltdown || The Austrians Were Right

The Austrian School and the Meltdown

by Ron Paul | Lew Rockwell.com

September 26, 2008

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Austrian Economics :: Why Austrian Economics Matters

Austrian Economic Theory: Why Austrian Economics Matters

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. | Lew Rockwell.com

Economics, wrote Joseph Schumpeter, is "a big omnibus which contains many passengers of incommensurable interests and abilities." That is, economists are an incoherent and ineffectual lot, and their reputation reflects it. Yet it need not be so, for the economist attempts to answer the most profound question regarding the material world.

Pretend you know nothing about the market, and ask yourself this question: how can society's entire deposit of scarce physical and intellectual resources be assembled so as to minimize cost; make use of the talents of every individual; provide for the needs and tastes of every consumer; encourage technical innovation, creativity, and social development; and do all this in a way that can be sustained?

This question is worthy of scholarly effort, and those who struggle with the answer are surely deserving of respect. The trouble is this: the methods used by much of mainstream economists have little to do with acting people, and so these methods do not yield conclusions that have the ring of truth. This does not have to be the case.

The central questions of economics have concerned the greatest thinkers since ancient Greece. And today, economic thinking is broken into many schools of thought: the Keynesians, the Post Keynesians, the New-Keynesians, the Classicals, the New Classicals (or Rational Expectations School), the Monetarists, the Chicago Public Choicers, the Virginia Public Choicers, the Experimentalists, the Game Theorists, the varying branches of Supply Sideism, and on and on it goes.

Austrian Economics :: Money and Our Future

Money and Our Future

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. | LewRockwell.com

January 27, 2009

This talk was given at the 2009 Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston.

We are fortunate to be living in these times, for we are seeing the unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian tradition.

Maybe that sounds implausible. What is fortunate about our times? The economy is tanking, stocks have been pummeled, unemployment is rising, and Washington is pursuing the worst combination of economic policies since Hoover and FDR. Nor does the new guy in charge seem to have a clue about the limits of what government can do.

Consider what it means to live through our times in the light of economic understanding. Even in the face of calamity, there is no mystery and hence fear is reduced. You look at department stores going belly-up, and you know why. You see parking lots empty, and you know the reason. You have friends losing their jobs, and there is clarity concerning the cause. You see depositors in failing banks lose their money, and you are not surprised. Prices behave in ways that shock and surprise everyone else, but you know what's what.

In many ways, it is like watching the movement of stars and planets with the scientific knowledge provided by astronomy, or observing the effects of a plague with medical knowledge.

TrinityLove Eco-Family:: State Controlled Consciousness: Fathers Love for Justice

TrinityLove Eco-Family:: Fathers Love for Justice

State Controlled Consciousness:

I Luv SA

"The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
-- H.L. Mencken, The American Mercury


"Perhaps school's greatest danger is that it may convince you life is nothing more than an institutionalized rat race"
-- Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School & Get a Real Life and Education