By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

The mainstream media has just recently started to catch up with the much more reliable alternative new community, acting as if these economic issues have suddenly come up out of nowhere.

This is only because the governments of the world and the private central banks that control them have been pretending it is not going on, blatantly lying to their people and doing them a great disservice by doing so.

In a Reuters article printed yesterday, the IMF made some unusually candid remarks about the economic crisis in which we are already embroiled. Unfortunately they still fail to represent the whole truth by acting as if the United States hasn’t already started defaulting.

Jose Vinals, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department was quoted in the article saying, “We have now entered very clearly into a new phase of the (global) crisis, which is, I would say, the political phase of the crisis.”

We have been in the political phase of this crisis for some time now, arguably since the clowns in the Senate and Congress have been bickering over completely insignificant cuts. An even more important part of this political phase of the global crisis is the need for politicians and bureaucrats to stop acting as if we have money to spend.

Recently I have mentioned just a few instances of our “leaders” signing on to even more debt, effectively blowing up the balloon of crippling interest to the point of bursting. One instance is the war in Libya, which is projected to cost at least $1.1 billion by September, a conservative estimation to say the least.

Another instance is the State Department spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on secret internet systems allowing dissidents to circumvent government controls.  Yet another instance is the DARPA project to build a replica internet proving ground for cyberwarfare training which has cost over one hundred million dollars thus far.

These are just three examples that come to mind that have come up in the past week or so, the amount of spending I’m not aware of likely dwarfs all of what I am aware of combined.

We must remember how this spending can actually occur when we don’t have any money: withholding all funds from retirement and pension funds. This is essentially theft, they just take the money before it goes into the account so it seems a little less absurd. That is like an employer withholding half of your paycheck for him/herself while claiming, “I’m not stealing from you! I’m just taking your money. Don’t worry I’ll pay you back some time in the indefinite future.”

The unfounded optimism of some is starting to wane, as evidenced by the change in the IMF’s GDP growth projections. While the change might seem small, being less than 1%, but this signifies a great deal of money. Even a .001% drop would be troublesome as we are already dealing with an immense deficit and even more enormous black hole of debt.

The fact is that Vinals from the IMF is right when he says that we are “playing with fire,” although I think this for different reasons. By not making drastic spending cuts, we are indeed setting ourselves up for trouble.

However, we need not make the spending cuts that so many have proposed in crucial social services. Before we put any austerity measures in place we had better have cut the Pentagon’s budget, gutted the black budget, gutted the CIA, repealed all corporate welfare and offshoring incentives, put Glass-Steagall back in place, as well as placing tariffs on imports.

We are indeed in deep water but this is nothing that can’t be mitigated or stopped altogether. We must demand total transparency in Washington and Wall Street and force the private Federal Reserve to account for every single penny they have given away as “stimulus.” We must also demand that the criminal banks fork over every single cent of the illegally laundered drug money they possess.

There are so many things we could do to generate revenue if the government didn’t selectively enforce tax laws, drug laws, and trading laws. In a day and age in which people are being raided by SWAT teams for unpaid student loans (while the Department of Education claims they don’t execute search warrants for unpaid loans), global megacorporations like GE don’t pay a single cent in taxes. The selective enforcement of laws and the unequal treatment of individuals based on wealth in this country and nations around the globe is undeniable. Unfortunately this unfair treatment seems to be on the rise and unless we start holding the so-called elite responsible for their actions, they will continue to walk all over the public and their supposed representatives until we stand up and refuse to be their debt slaves.

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