“We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness — you maniacs! In God’s name you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”

 – Howard Beale from the movie Network

 When the movie Network was released 35 years ago it was considered a satire. No one at the time could imagine how far the standards of television, and society in general, would decay.

 Today it is considered prophesy.

 While the character Howard Beale touched on the merging of fiction and reality, I doubt that creators of the movie could have dreamed where it would lead us today.

  I’ve been out of work for 96 weeks. That’s about four times the combined duration that I was previously unemployed in my life, starting when I graduated high school a quarter century ago.

 It’s been a hard pill to swallow. It undermines your sense of self-worth. It’s very humbling.

 You can’t go through something like this without taking a good, hard look at your life and figuring out a few things.

 For those of you who are unemployed now, or expect to be in the near future, you might be interested in what I’ve learned. Maybe you already know these things. If you do then perhaps you can share your insight with the rest of us.

 If you don’t know these things, then you should.

  The unemployment rate is dropping through the floor, and Republicans are taking credit for it. Don’t believe me? Then look at the latest employment report.

 The unemployment rate is suddenly sinking at the fastest pace in a half-century, falling to 9 percent from 9.8 percent in just two months – the most encouraging sign for the job market since the recession ended.

 That certainly sounds like the job market is going gangbusters to me.

  Now here’s the trick: only 36,000 jobs were created to get the unemployment rate to drop by 0.4%.

 Given those facts, I did a little math.

Milo informed him solemnly. “A strong Egyptian-cotton speculating industry means a much stronger America.”…

“You see?” said Yossarian. “You’re much better at it than I am. You almost make it sound true.”

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22

 The price of Egyptian cotton, now at its highest level since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is causing concern on Wall Street.

 Despite the fact that Egypt doesn’t produce much oil, the price of crude oil has now reached $103 a barrel, and Egypt’s protesters are being blamed.

 “Economic interests have been exposed to real danger,” Al Desouky said.

 If there is one thing that we can be certain of, as far as the financial markets are concerned it’s never a good time for people to demand basic human rights and dignity. Financial markets tend to applaud military coups, and frown on popular democracy.

 The trick is recognizing that the financial markets only represent a very small, elite, section of society.

  The Egyptian government shut down most of the internet on Thursday, on the eve of what should be a massive protest march.

 A group of internet activists collective, Anonymous, warned the Egyptian government against this very action just hours before.

 “Anonymous wants you to offer free access to uncensored media in your entire country,” it said in a Facebook posting.

  “When you ignore this message, not only will we attack your government websites, we will also make sure that the international media see the horrid reality you impose on your people!” it said.

“Operation Egypt” has already been in effect ever since Egypt cut access to Twitter on Tuesday. Today it kicked into full operation.

 An image posted on Facebook urged interested individuals to join IRC chat rooms, where, Netcraft said, new recruits were being asked to download and install the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), software that makes DDoS attacks easy to stage.

 What we are seeing in Egypt, where the social media is on the front lines, is a repeat of events that happened in Tunisia just a few weeks ago, events that continue even today.

  It now seems likely to be one of the most tragic and inevitable global trends for 2011: food riots.

 People are burning stores in India, Chili, China, Egypt, and Algeria.

 The recent overthrow of the Tunisian dictator was about a lot of things, including corruption and unemployment, but it was also about food prices too. Protest signs in Tunis included examples like, “WE WANT bread and water and no Ben Ali.” Some protesters waved loaves of bread to emphasize their point.

 Food price protests have spread even to oil-rich Oman.

 Meanwhile, governments are taking desperate measures in the face of soaring prices.

 India has banned the export of onions after vegetable prices have risen 70% in the past year. China is implementing price controls and building up a strategic supply of foodstuffs. South Korea is lowering import tariffs on food. Many arab governments are resorting to tax cuts and hand-outs to defer popular protests.

 The scary thing is that everyone expects food prices to keep increasing.

 Beef and pork prices are at record highs, but, if forecasts prove accurate, consumers have only just begun to see higher prices for food and fuel.

  Steady increases in the costs of grain and energy since last fall are drawing comparisons to the summer of 2008, when corn and soybean prices set a record and gasoline topped $4 a gallon, said Purdue University farm economist Chris Hurt.

  Unlike in 2008, however, grain prices are up before the first seeds go into the ground, and fuel costs are rising well ahead of the spring-summer driving season.

 The key question is “why”? Why is food price inflation suddenly so high?

  While America was distracted with issues of guns, political rhetoric, and domestic violence, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe reached its next tipping point.

 Alan Wilde, head of fixed income and currency at Baring Asset Management, said: “The crisis is reaching another key phase with debt auctions this week. It seems unlikely that Portugal can avoid a bail-out.”..

 In a further blow to Mr Sócrates, António Bagão Félix, a respected former finance minister and rightwing politician, said on Monday that it was no longer a question of “if” Portugal would have to turn to the European financial stability facility, the EU bail-out fund, for help, but “when”.

  The cost to the country of high bond yields was increasing every day, he said. “The situation is unsustainable.”

 The European Central Bank was forced to intervene on Portugal’s bond market on Monday when investors came close to abandoning the country’s debt entirely. The yield on 10-year bonds reached a near high of 7.18%, a rate similar to that which triggered the bailouts of Ireland and Greece.

  On the day after world’s price of food hit an all-time high, violence erupted in the streets of Algiers.

ALGIERS, Algeria – Riots over rising food prices and chronic unemployment spiraled out from Algeria’s capital on Thursday, with youths torching government buildings and shouting “Bring us Sugar!”

At no time since records have been kept has the cost of eating been so expensive. The last time prices were this high there were food riots in 32 nations, and that has some people worried.

 “We are entering danger territory,” said the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s chief economist, Abdolreza Abbassian.

  Global food prices have risen for the sixth month in succession. Wheat has almost doubled since June, sugar is at a 30-year high, and pork is up by a quarter since the beginning of 2010.

  It’s probably the oldest question in capitalism.

Make no mistake, there are a myriad of reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and only a few apply to any one instance. That doesn’t prevent generalization from being made. The defenders of the status quo explain it as thus:

 The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich learn to become stewards of the talents given to them. The poor have squandered their talents and are not given more.

 Clean and simple. The poor are poor because they’ve brought it upon themselves. The rich are just better than you. Case closed. It’s a very convenient philosophy if you’re rich.

 In reality there is only one reason for the growing wealth disparity that applies to practically every instance, and it isn’t because one group is better, or smarter, or more amoral than another group.

 It’s not a hidden secret. Everyone is aware of it, but few understand it as well as they think they do.

   By 1933 Americans were losing faith in the banking system. Banks had been failing by the thousands since 1930. When a bank failed it took everyone’s life savings with it.

 On February 14, 1933, a coalition of major banks asked Governor Comstock of Michigan to declare a statewide bank holiday. He granted it.

 The governors of Iowa, Tennessee and Kansas declared bank holidays in January, but it was Michigan that tipped the scales. It set off a nationwide panic that led to bank holidays in almost every state. On March 4, 1933, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York requested a statewide bank holiday be declared. On the same day that FDR was inaugurated as President of the United States, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania all declared bank holidays.

 The banking system had utterly and completely failed. In most counties there wasn’t a single working bank even before the bank holidays. Now the entire banking system simply vanished from the face of America despite years of federal government support.

 No one was sure if any bank in America would ever open again.

When FDR instituted the Emergency Banking Act the following week there was no one to oppose it.

 It was in this atmosphere of crisis that famous economist Irving Fisher proposed a radical new idea for money.

  I know that the GOP hasn’t taken over the House yet, but at the same time the markets are considered to be “forward looking indicators” by respected economists.

 Given that, let’s look at what has happened since the huge Republican victory in November.

  Merriam-Webster named its Word of the Year for 2010 based on the number of searches. That word is the 14th century noun “austerity”.

 If you watched 60 Minutes the other night, you would have heard New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie tell us how we have no choice but to slash wages and benefits and lay off thousands of school teachers, police, and firefighters in every state.

 You will also hear lots of economists use the phrase “competitive”, as in “the American economy needs to be more competitive in the world”. What they really mean is that we need to accept lower wages and a lower standard of living. If we do this then it will be “good for us”, that there is economic value in this.

 What is really going on is a set of false choices that even the world’s financial leaders don’t believe.