This week, Herman Cain failed his foreign policy pop quiz on Libya ("I got all this stuff twirling around in my head" is the campaign trail equivalent of "the dog ate my homework"). Congress failed basic nutrition when it voted to dismiss new guidelines that would have upped the amount of fresh veggies and fruit in school lunches and instead declared that frozen pizza qualified as a vegetable (which, I'm sure, had nothing to do with the $5.6 million the food industry has spent lobbying against the healthier regulations). And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn't pass the sniff test when he claimed that he ordered the surprise NYPD raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment because it had become a "fire safety hazard." The Occupy movement is in large part a response to the diminished credibility of governments everywhere. And the way governments are dealing with the movement only further diminishes their credibility. An epic fail.
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Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for World Revolution
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Herman Cain suggests Taliban are playing a role in Libyan ...
My words and work on Occupy can be found on http://www.globalpoetry.net and on www.kboo.fm.
My question is how many people get evicted at 2AM with no notice?
If NY decided to evict at 2pm I might have seen their point. I doubt there was going to be a fire at 4AM that night.
It's a little scary when we get the deception and won't play any longer. Then what?
It's well within the realm of possibilities that a wave of popular anti-incumbency sweeps through Congress in 2012, and the extreme polarization and highly visible fault-lines of doctrinal disintegration of the traditional Republican and Democratic corporate duopoly parties appear in 2012.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/danielle-crittenden/sunday-roundup-oops_b_1103174.html?ref=canada
This video: "Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar" remains accurate in its long-term prognosis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n3g5lUgkWk
The following was frontpage leading article "Enter the Yuan: the world's next reserve currency" by Kopin Tan in November 14, 2011 edition of BARRON'S weekly financial paper: "By 2020, expect China's yuan to be widely used alongside the weakening euro and dollar in international trade and as a store of value." The article is much longer, with detailed data and charts. For purpose of keeping it to manageable size, only about half its length is included here:--
(continued ... )
Part1of5:
""The USDollar is the currency of the world, but that dominance could begin to erode if China has its way. It won't happen right away, but by end of the decade, the yuan could join the buck and the euro as one of the world's reserve, or anchor, currencies.
Nearly three of every four of our hundred-dollar bills circulate abroad. Oil, copper and almost every other internationally traded commodity is denominated in dollars. The vaults at foreign banks and governments are stuffed with greenbacks. 60% of the planet's foreign-exchange reserves are made up of USDollars, far more than 27% for the euro and 4% for the yen.
But with the dollar depreciating and the euro imploding, China is seizing the opportunity to encourage other countries to use its currency as a medium for trading and investments, as well as a store of value. It's a big leap forward since the yuan -- also called renminbi, which translates literally into "the people's money" -- is tightly controlled and isn't freely convertible into other currencies.
In recent years, China has stepped up an ambitious plan to increase circulation of yuan outside the the mainland and persuade trading partners to use it to invoice or settle transactions. It's aggressively building a market for yuan-denominated debt. In the past year, McDonald's aswellas Caterpillar and Unilever have all raised money by issuing yuan-denominated debt in HongKong. That's just a start.
(continued ... )
If all goes according to plan, the yuan could become one of the world's reserve currencies as soon as 2015, a daunting deadline, given the political and economic challenges of making the yuan freely convertible. More likely, it will become an alternate reserve to the buck and the euro around 2020 -- the target China has set for Shanghai to join NewYork and London as a global financial hub.
This being China, everything must happen at Beijing's pace. The yuan cannot become a credible reserve until Beijing relinquishes its rigid control of the exchange rate and allows capital to flow freely in and out of the country. Yet in the short term, China can't afford for that to happen until it has successfully implemented its five-year plan to shift its export-reliant economy toward domestic consumption and services. Allowing the currency to rise too quickly would hurt the competitiveness of its still-powerful manufacturers.
But over the long haul, internationalizing the yuan plays into Beijing's grand plan. "The last three years have made it clear to China that it can't sustain a growth model that's overly dependent on US or European consumers," says Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. "This has given China a number of imperatives, one of which is to stay the course of gradual currency appreciation and internationalization."
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"I got all this stuff twirling around in my head" sounds like a classic description of confusion. Like confusing Libya with Afghanistan or (a presidential candidate) not knowing which countries have nuclear arms. In such a state, perhaps Mr. Cain may have informed Congress that pizza is a vegetable.
For their part, Congress is rumored to be working on federal tax credits for farms that grow pizza.
Nothing but the best for our school children.