Sunday, September 26, 2010
America The Bankrupt
U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff
Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.
What it can and must do is radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess. But this is the good news. It means they can each be redesigned to achieve their legitimate purposes at much lower cost and, in the process, revitalize the economy.
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: “Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.”
But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.
Double Our Taxes
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled. It’s also saying the longer the country waits to make tough fiscal adjustments, the more painful they will be.
Is the IMF bonkers?
No. It has done its homework. So has the Congressional Budget Office whose Long-Term Budget Outlook, released in June, shows an even larger problem.
‘Unofficial’ Liabilities
Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our “official” debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities “unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.
For example, our Social Security FICA contributions are called taxes and our future Social Security benefits are called transfer payments. The government could equally well have labeled our contributions “loans” and called our future benefits “repayment of these loans less an old age tax,” with the old age tax making up for any difference between the benefits promised and principal plus interest on the contributions.
The fiscal gap isn’t affected by fiscal labeling. It’s the only theoretically correct measure of our long-run fiscal condition because it considers all spending, no matter how labeled, and incorporates long-term and short-term policy.
$4 Trillion Bill
How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?
Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.
Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.
And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.
Worse Than Greece
Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.
Some doctrinaire Keynesian economists would say any stimulus over the next few years won’t affect our ability to deal with deficits in the long run.
This is wrong as a simple matter of arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the government’s credit-card bill and each year’s 14 percent of GDP is the interest on that bill. If it doesn’t pay this year’s interest, it will be added to the balance.
Demand-siders say forgoing this year’s 14 percent fiscal tightening, and spending even more, will pay for itself, in present value, by expanding the economy and tax revenue.
My reaction? Get real, or go hang out with equally deluded supply-siders. Our country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain “solutions.”
Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.
What it can and must do is radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess. But this is the good news. It means they can each be redesigned to achieve their legitimate purposes at much lower cost and, in the process, revitalize the economy.
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: “Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.”
But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.
Double Our Taxes
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled. It’s also saying the longer the country waits to make tough fiscal adjustments, the more painful they will be.
Is the IMF bonkers?
No. It has done its homework. So has the Congressional Budget Office whose Long-Term Budget Outlook, released in June, shows an even larger problem.
‘Unofficial’ Liabilities
Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our “official” debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities “unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.
For example, our Social Security FICA contributions are called taxes and our future Social Security benefits are called transfer payments. The government could equally well have labeled our contributions “loans” and called our future benefits “repayment of these loans less an old age tax,” with the old age tax making up for any difference between the benefits promised and principal plus interest on the contributions.
The fiscal gap isn’t affected by fiscal labeling. It’s the only theoretically correct measure of our long-run fiscal condition because it considers all spending, no matter how labeled, and incorporates long-term and short-term policy.
$4 Trillion Bill
How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?
Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.
Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.
And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.
Worse Than Greece
Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.
Some doctrinaire Keynesian economists would say any stimulus over the next few years won’t affect our ability to deal with deficits in the long run.
This is wrong as a simple matter of arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the government’s credit-card bill and each year’s 14 percent of GDP is the interest on that bill. If it doesn’t pay this year’s interest, it will be added to the balance.
Demand-siders say forgoing this year’s 14 percent fiscal tightening, and spending even more, will pay for itself, in present value, by expanding the economy and tax revenue.
My reaction? Get real, or go hang out with equally deluded supply-siders. Our country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain “solutions.”
Lessons Lost On Mankind
Sobering Lesson for the World as Gold and Silver Set to Explode Higher
As the old expression has it, there are: “None so blind as those who will not see.”
The world is about to get a sobering lesson over the next year or two as the precious metals markets move explosively to the up side. As happens so often in the affairs of men, reality is there in front of us just sitting and being itself. Yet so few of the species homo sapiens can see it.
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I have presented an alternative explanation for the blind stupidity of the Keynesian “economists” and their almost perfect record of being wrong. On March 9, 1933, Congress gave the commercial bankers the special privilege to create money out of nothing. Immediately the money supply began to increase, and today the price level is 17 times what it was on that day.
Since the bankers could now make loans (receiving interest) without paying for capital (as the old fashion savings bank or S&L did), they naturally had a strong interest to do so. They immediately began to fund a group of “economists” who emerged to defend the thesis that creating money out of nothing was the “road to plenty” for a society.
Creating money had been tried many times in many different countries, always with the same result. Prices went to the moon, and the society got very poor. The most recent example of this was Zimbabwe where life expectancy dropped from 60 years to 40 years over a decade, a figure which explains the photographs of human skeletons and the official unemployment rate of 95%. By comparison, the two most successful countries in world economic history are Britain (including the Commonwealth) and the United States. And these are countries which maintained a strict hard money standard for over a century.
The “economists” who apologized for paper money and served the commercial bankers were a collection of phonies and frauds. Most prominent here were two American economists named William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, who wrote a book in 1928 entitled, “The Road to Plenty.” In the 1940s, the bankers realized that something had to be done, and they embarked upon a campaign to buy titles for these crackpot economists.
But first a British pedophile (John Maynard Keynes) “improved” the Foster and Catchings fraud by employing a technique I call the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Here the wolf consists of a group of people in politics or economics who wish to go back to the way things were in the Middle Ages. The proper term for such people is reactionaries. The sheep’s clothing is a disguise these people adopted to pretend to be in favor of science, liberty and progress. When you see words like “new” or “progressive,” then you are dealing with the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Keynes plagiarized the Foster and Catching theory, called it “The New Economics,” and presented it as the latest word in the modern science of economics. The bankers then entered and literally bought fancy titles for their favorite “economists” so that these could use the prestige so gained to influence the country in favor of paper money. The classic case here was when the Manhattan Bank (later Chase Manhattan) bought a chair of economics for John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard to provide a platform from which he could present his paper money theories and serve the interests of the bankers.
This is a fantastic picture. The entire institution of higher learning in America was bought out by the bankers. They took the bankers’ money and sold a pack of lies to the American people.
Actually, I have written a book on the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing tactic (The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing). It is scheduled for publication soon by the Foundation for Economic Education and Harper Collins. It is the story of a gigantic fraud which has deceived our entire society and come close to overthrowing freedom in America. A group of reactionaries (people who want to go back to the past) are pretending to be advocates of progress and have pulled the wool over the eyes of all of the people.
Once the banker “economists” infiltrated into our higher education system, it ceased to be education, and the teaching of economics became a joke. If you take an economics course in 99% of all American institutions today, you will be taught a pack of lies, not just any lies but precisely the lies designed to support the bankers’ privilege to create money. You can hear a good many of these lies any time Bernanke opens his mouth to speak.
Now when economics was a science (prior to the 1930s), the basic thing that economists did was to make predictions. Prediction is the basic tool of science. If you have a true theory, then you use it to make a prediction, and when the prediction proves correct, then this is supporting evidence for the theory.
Naturally, when the banker “economists” came in during the 1940s, they established an unparalleled record of failed predictions. The year I entered Harvard (1955) John Kenneth Galbraith went to Washington and testified before Congress that the stock market (DJI 420) was in danger of another 1929. He caused a panic as speculators in the market rushed to sell their stocks, driving the DJI from 420 down to 400. It then turned and rose for the next 11 years, hitting DJI 1,000 in 1966. There was no repeat of 1929.
We had a more modern example of this foolishness in late July. After a decline in the gold market through late July, Alan Abelson of Barron’s predicted (on July 26) that the price of gold was ready for a substantial decline. Gold declined for exactly one day as Abelson’s readers rushed to sell. You know what has happened since that time. Gold turned on a dime. The breakout created on the 27th proved false, and it is now at $1,275. Abelson’s readers are sitting there with their mouths agape. They sold their gold at the exact bottom.
Now certainly people can make mistakes. The progress of science is full of them. But when a scientist makes a mistake, he observes it and admits it. When a banker “economist” makes a mistake, he hopes the public will not notice, puts a good front on it and uses his title to get away with it. I have often referenced Henry Kaufman’s prediction of higher interest rates and a depression in 1982. I happened to catch Kaufman on a talking head TV show around the turn of the century. There was the host obsequiously kissing up to him and not one mention of the fiasco of 1982.
I was screaming at the TV set. “What about the depression? What about the high interest rates?” Kaufman got millions of stock market traders to sell their stocks with the DJI under 800. It was the bonehead play of the century. But the host continued smoothly on. “Oh yes, Mr. Kaufman, what is your opinion of the coming year?” To heck with the coming year. How does he explain his prediction of 1982?
I have detailed in these articles many other bonehead predictions such as the Great Depression of 1990 and Dow 36,000 (by 2003-05). Why are all these establishment “economists” making one wrong prediction after another – throughout their entire lives?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know anything about economics, and they don’t care. They are hired agents of the bankers, and their impressive titles are intended to get the sucker public to believe any absurd thing they say. Their most common error is; to predict “deflation” because they are trying to get the Fed to print money. When the “deflation” does not happen, they shrug their shoulders, hope you will quickly forget and go about their business. They are confidence men, not economists, and as long as you are stupid enough to believe them, they will continue to lie to you.
But consider the tremendous position that puts us gold speculators in. The last employment of the “deflation” lie occurred in 2008, and virtually all of the media joined in. The fools who believed the lie rushed to sell commodities in the last half of the year, and the CRB index fell in half. But despite this artificial self-confirming effect we have still not had one year in which the Consumer Price Index declined. “Deflation,” where is thy sting?
And even as all await the “deflation” with bated breath, commodities are gathering strength for a second move up. Gold has broken out to new highs. Silver has broken out from an ascending triangle. Wheat and corn are on the move. Coffee is at new highs for the century. The CRB is gathering strength for an attack on the July 2008 high. The charts are not predicting “deflation.” The charts are predicting “inflation.”
So here are all the traders in the world taken in by a lie, the exact same lie which has been used to take their money over and over and over. Here are all these stupid people rushing to give their money to us, and all we have to do is to reach out our hand.
And what it all comes down to is that, if you want to be a good speculator (or a good person), then you have to see reality as it is. This is easier said than done. These five little words contain a crucially important moral virtue. To actually follow them requires a lot of work. You must draw your own conclusions in defiance of what the people around you believe (and are trying to shove down your throat). This is the virtue known as contrary opinion. You must put your emotions aside and believe what is true, not what you want to believe. Emotions are great things, but a strong emotion can cloud the mind. If you try to suppress the emotion, it will just get stronger and come out in ways of which you are not aware. What you must do is to tell your emotion to temporarily stand aside.
I often find it effective to simply talk to my emotions (as though they were a little person inside of me). For example, I might say, “Avarice, stand aside for a while. I need to think clearly if I am going to be able to give you what you want. You are a beautiful woman and should be given fine jewelry and pretty clothes. But if I am to accomplish this, then I have to see reality as it is. When I have made my big score, I will invite you back, and we will have great fun together.” Ditto, ditto for the emotion of fear (which in the markets is very powerful).
Incidentally, Keynes’ views on fear and greed, like everything else the man said, are garbage. Markets are not made by cycles of fear and greed. An easy way to see this is with the auto stocks (more so with the housing group). They characteristically develop very low P:E ratios at stock market tops (and high P:Es at market bottoms). Wait a minute. If the market puts a low P:E on the auto group near a market top, is it committing greed? No chance. If market tops are caused by an irrational desire for money, then why are auto stocks (one of the big movers) showing lower P:Es at the top? This is rational behavior, not irrational.
What, in fact, causes stock market tops is government intervention (via the Fed). When the Fed eases (as in 1982 and 2008), stocks form a bottom. When the Fed tightens (as in 1987 and 2006), stocks form a top. I have known this for 41 years. It has enabled me to predict 90% of all bull and bear moves in the stock market. I have been writing about economics for all of this time. Wouldn’t you think that somewhere, someone would have caught on? How about when I predicted Black Monday on October 19, 1987? On that day, the DJI fell 22%. All these people lost a big bundle that day (as they will lose more bundles in the future), but no one woke up to see reality as it was.
None so blind as those who will not see.
As the old expression has it, there are: “None so blind as those who will not see.”
The world is about to get a sobering lesson over the next year or two as the precious metals markets move explosively to the up side. As happens so often in the affairs of men, reality is there in front of us just sitting and being itself. Yet so few of the species homo sapiens can see it.
google_protectAndRun("ads_core.google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);
I have presented an alternative explanation for the blind stupidity of the Keynesian “economists” and their almost perfect record of being wrong. On March 9, 1933, Congress gave the commercial bankers the special privilege to create money out of nothing. Immediately the money supply began to increase, and today the price level is 17 times what it was on that day.
Since the bankers could now make loans (receiving interest) without paying for capital (as the old fashion savings bank or S&L did), they naturally had a strong interest to do so. They immediately began to fund a group of “economists” who emerged to defend the thesis that creating money out of nothing was the “road to plenty” for a society.
Creating money had been tried many times in many different countries, always with the same result. Prices went to the moon, and the society got very poor. The most recent example of this was Zimbabwe where life expectancy dropped from 60 years to 40 years over a decade, a figure which explains the photographs of human skeletons and the official unemployment rate of 95%. By comparison, the two most successful countries in world economic history are Britain (including the Commonwealth) and the United States. And these are countries which maintained a strict hard money standard for over a century.
The “economists” who apologized for paper money and served the commercial bankers were a collection of phonies and frauds. Most prominent here were two American economists named William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, who wrote a book in 1928 entitled, “The Road to Plenty.” In the 1940s, the bankers realized that something had to be done, and they embarked upon a campaign to buy titles for these crackpot economists.
But first a British pedophile (John Maynard Keynes) “improved” the Foster and Catchings fraud by employing a technique I call the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Here the wolf consists of a group of people in politics or economics who wish to go back to the way things were in the Middle Ages. The proper term for such people is reactionaries. The sheep’s clothing is a disguise these people adopted to pretend to be in favor of science, liberty and progress. When you see words like “new” or “progressive,” then you are dealing with the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Keynes plagiarized the Foster and Catching theory, called it “The New Economics,” and presented it as the latest word in the modern science of economics. The bankers then entered and literally bought fancy titles for their favorite “economists” so that these could use the prestige so gained to influence the country in favor of paper money. The classic case here was when the Manhattan Bank (later Chase Manhattan) bought a chair of economics for John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard to provide a platform from which he could present his paper money theories and serve the interests of the bankers.
This is a fantastic picture. The entire institution of higher learning in America was bought out by the bankers. They took the bankers’ money and sold a pack of lies to the American people.
Actually, I have written a book on the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing tactic (The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing). It is scheduled for publication soon by the Foundation for Economic Education and Harper Collins. It is the story of a gigantic fraud which has deceived our entire society and come close to overthrowing freedom in America. A group of reactionaries (people who want to go back to the past) are pretending to be advocates of progress and have pulled the wool over the eyes of all of the people.
Once the banker “economists” infiltrated into our higher education system, it ceased to be education, and the teaching of economics became a joke. If you take an economics course in 99% of all American institutions today, you will be taught a pack of lies, not just any lies but precisely the lies designed to support the bankers’ privilege to create money. You can hear a good many of these lies any time Bernanke opens his mouth to speak.
Now when economics was a science (prior to the 1930s), the basic thing that economists did was to make predictions. Prediction is the basic tool of science. If you have a true theory, then you use it to make a prediction, and when the prediction proves correct, then this is supporting evidence for the theory.
Naturally, when the banker “economists” came in during the 1940s, they established an unparalleled record of failed predictions. The year I entered Harvard (1955) John Kenneth Galbraith went to Washington and testified before Congress that the stock market (DJI 420) was in danger of another 1929. He caused a panic as speculators in the market rushed to sell their stocks, driving the DJI from 420 down to 400. It then turned and rose for the next 11 years, hitting DJI 1,000 in 1966. There was no repeat of 1929.
We had a more modern example of this foolishness in late July. After a decline in the gold market through late July, Alan Abelson of Barron’s predicted (on July 26) that the price of gold was ready for a substantial decline. Gold declined for exactly one day as Abelson’s readers rushed to sell. You know what has happened since that time. Gold turned on a dime. The breakout created on the 27th proved false, and it is now at $1,275. Abelson’s readers are sitting there with their mouths agape. They sold their gold at the exact bottom.
Now certainly people can make mistakes. The progress of science is full of them. But when a scientist makes a mistake, he observes it and admits it. When a banker “economist” makes a mistake, he hopes the public will not notice, puts a good front on it and uses his title to get away with it. I have often referenced Henry Kaufman’s prediction of higher interest rates and a depression in 1982. I happened to catch Kaufman on a talking head TV show around the turn of the century. There was the host obsequiously kissing up to him and not one mention of the fiasco of 1982.
I was screaming at the TV set. “What about the depression? What about the high interest rates?” Kaufman got millions of stock market traders to sell their stocks with the DJI under 800. It was the bonehead play of the century. But the host continued smoothly on. “Oh yes, Mr. Kaufman, what is your opinion of the coming year?” To heck with the coming year. How does he explain his prediction of 1982?
I have detailed in these articles many other bonehead predictions such as the Great Depression of 1990 and Dow 36,000 (by 2003-05). Why are all these establishment “economists” making one wrong prediction after another – throughout their entire lives?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know anything about economics, and they don’t care. They are hired agents of the bankers, and their impressive titles are intended to get the sucker public to believe any absurd thing they say. Their most common error is; to predict “deflation” because they are trying to get the Fed to print money. When the “deflation” does not happen, they shrug their shoulders, hope you will quickly forget and go about their business. They are confidence men, not economists, and as long as you are stupid enough to believe them, they will continue to lie to you.
But consider the tremendous position that puts us gold speculators in. The last employment of the “deflation” lie occurred in 2008, and virtually all of the media joined in. The fools who believed the lie rushed to sell commodities in the last half of the year, and the CRB index fell in half. But despite this artificial self-confirming effect we have still not had one year in which the Consumer Price Index declined. “Deflation,” where is thy sting?
And even as all await the “deflation” with bated breath, commodities are gathering strength for a second move up. Gold has broken out to new highs. Silver has broken out from an ascending triangle. Wheat and corn are on the move. Coffee is at new highs for the century. The CRB is gathering strength for an attack on the July 2008 high. The charts are not predicting “deflation.” The charts are predicting “inflation.”
So here are all the traders in the world taken in by a lie, the exact same lie which has been used to take their money over and over and over. Here are all these stupid people rushing to give their money to us, and all we have to do is to reach out our hand.
And what it all comes down to is that, if you want to be a good speculator (or a good person), then you have to see reality as it is. This is easier said than done. These five little words contain a crucially important moral virtue. To actually follow them requires a lot of work. You must draw your own conclusions in defiance of what the people around you believe (and are trying to shove down your throat). This is the virtue known as contrary opinion. You must put your emotions aside and believe what is true, not what you want to believe. Emotions are great things, but a strong emotion can cloud the mind. If you try to suppress the emotion, it will just get stronger and come out in ways of which you are not aware. What you must do is to tell your emotion to temporarily stand aside.
I often find it effective to simply talk to my emotions (as though they were a little person inside of me). For example, I might say, “Avarice, stand aside for a while. I need to think clearly if I am going to be able to give you what you want. You are a beautiful woman and should be given fine jewelry and pretty clothes. But if I am to accomplish this, then I have to see reality as it is. When I have made my big score, I will invite you back, and we will have great fun together.” Ditto, ditto for the emotion of fear (which in the markets is very powerful).
Incidentally, Keynes’ views on fear and greed, like everything else the man said, are garbage. Markets are not made by cycles of fear and greed. An easy way to see this is with the auto stocks (more so with the housing group). They characteristically develop very low P:E ratios at stock market tops (and high P:Es at market bottoms). Wait a minute. If the market puts a low P:E on the auto group near a market top, is it committing greed? No chance. If market tops are caused by an irrational desire for money, then why are auto stocks (one of the big movers) showing lower P:Es at the top? This is rational behavior, not irrational.
What, in fact, causes stock market tops is government intervention (via the Fed). When the Fed eases (as in 1982 and 2008), stocks form a bottom. When the Fed tightens (as in 1987 and 2006), stocks form a top. I have known this for 41 years. It has enabled me to predict 90% of all bull and bear moves in the stock market. I have been writing about economics for all of this time. Wouldn’t you think that somewhere, someone would have caught on? How about when I predicted Black Monday on October 19, 1987? On that day, the DJI fell 22%. All these people lost a big bundle that day (as they will lose more bundles in the future), but no one woke up to see reality as it was.
None so blind as those who will not see.
Gold and Silver Are Sounding The Alarm
We've been sounding this drum for years. Trouble is, it's too late for most americans.
Nicely Said......................
"It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping of what is now called 'a conspiracy theory of history.' For a search for 'conspiracies,' as misguided as the results often are, means a search for motives, and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites. If, however, any tyranny or venality, or aggressive war imposed by the State was brought about not by particular State rulers but by mysterious and arcane 'social forces,' or by the imperfect state of the world -- or if, in some way, everyone was guilty -- then there is no point in anyone's becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, a discrediting of 'conspiracy theories' will make the subjects more likely to believe the 'general welfare' reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern State for engaging in aggressive actions." - Murray Rothbard
For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again
Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.
But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.
College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.
But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.
Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.
Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.
After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy's recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.
New York Times
Patricia Reid, 57, lost her job at Boeing four years ago and has struggled to find a new position.
For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.
Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.
"There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed," said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. "I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady," she said. "It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don't even realize it."
Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their resumes often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.
Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.
The most recent recession has increased the need to extend working life. Home values, often a family's most important asset, have been battered. Stock portfolios are only now starting to recover. According to a Gallup poll in April, more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995.
Older workers who lose their jobs could pose a policy problem if they lose their ability to be self-sufficient. "That's what we should be worrying about," said Carl E. Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, "what it means to this class of the new unemployables, people who have been cast adrift at a very vulnerable part of their career and their life."
Forced early retirement imposes an intense financial strain, particularly for those at lower incomes. The recession and its aftermath have already pushed down some older workers. In figures released last week by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate among those 55 to 64 increased to 9.4 percent in 2009, from 8.6 percent in 2007.
But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse's income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.
"That's what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security," Ms. Reid said. "Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job."
As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.
Stunned and depressed, she sent out resumes, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.
Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.
As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. "If I let myself think like that all the time," she said, "I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning."
With her husband's home repair business pummeled by the housing downturn, the bills are mounting. Although the couple do not have a mortgage on their 3,000-square-foot house, they pay close to $7,000 a year in property taxes. The roof is leaking. Their utility bills can be $300 a month in the winter, even though they often keep the thermostat turned down to 50 degrees.
They could try to sell their home, but given the depressed housing market, they are reluctant.
"We are circling the drain here, and I am bailing like hell," said Ms. Reid, emitting an incongruous cackle, as if laughter is the only response to her plight. "But the boat is still sinking."
It is not just the finances that have destabilized her life.
Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. "We've both been hard workers our whole lives," said Mr. Mielock, 59. Ms. Reid sometimes rose just after 3 a.m. to make the hourlong commute to Boeing's data center in Bellevue and attended night school to earn a master's in management information systems.
"A job is more than a job, you know," Mr. Mielock said. "It's where you fit in society."
Here in the greater Seattle area, a fifth of those claiming extended unemployment benefits are 55 and older.
To help seniors polish their job-seeking skills, WorkSource, a local consortium of government and nonprofit groups, recently began offering seminars. On a recent morning, 14 people gathered in a windowless conference room at a local community college to get tips on how to age-proof their resumes and deflect questions about being overqualified.
Motivational posters hung on one wall, bearing slogans like "Failure is the path of least persistence."
Using PowerPoint slides, Liz Howland, the chipper but no-nonsense session leader, projected some common myths about older job-seekers on a screen: "Older workers are less capable of evaluating information, making decisions and problem-solving" or "Older workers are rigid and inflexible and have trouble adapting to change."
Ms. Howland, 61, ticked off the reasons those statements were inaccurate. But a clear undercurrent of anxiety ran through the room. "Is it really true that if you have the energy and the passion that they will overlook the age factor?" asked a 61-year-old man who had been laid off from a furniture maker last October.
Gallows humor reigned. As Ms. Howland — who suggested that applicants remove any dates older than 15 years from their resume — advised the group on how to finesse interview questions like "When did you have the job that helped you develop that skill?" one out-of-work journalist deadpanned: "How about 'during the 20th century?'"
During a break, Anne Richard, who declined to give her age, confessed she was afraid she would not be able to work again after losing her contract as a house director at a University of Washington sorority in June. Although she had 20 years of experience as an office clerk in Chattanooga, Tenn., she feared her technology skills had fallen behind.
"I don't feel like I can compete with kids who have been on computers all their lives," said Ms. Richard, who was sleeping on the couch of a couple she had met at church and contemplating imminent homelessness.
Older people who lose their jobs take longer to find work. In August, the average time unemployed for those 55 and older was slightly more than 39 weeks, according to the Labor Department, the longest of any age group. That is much worse than in August 1983, also after a deep recession, when someone unemployed in that age group spent an average of 27.5 weeks finding work.
At this year's pace of an average of 82,000 new jobs a month, it will take at least eight more years to create the 8 million positions lost during the recession. And that does not even allow for population growth.
Advocates for the elderly worry that younger people are more likely to fill the new jobs as well.
"I do think the longer someone is out of work, the more employers are going to question why it is that someone hasn't been able to find work," said Sara Rix, senior strategic policy adviser at AARP, the lobbying group for seniors. "Their skills have atrophied for one thing, and technology changes so rapidly that even if nothing happened to the skills that you have, they may become increasingly less relevant to the jobs that are becoming available."
In four years of job hunting, Ms. Reid has discovered that she is no longer technologically proficient. In one of a handful of interviews she has secured, for an auditing position at the Port of Seattle, she learned that the job required skills in PeopleSoft, financial software she had never used. She assumes that deficiency cost her the job.
Ms. Reid is still five years away from being eligible for Social Security. But even then, she would be drawing early, which reduces monthly payments. Taking Social Security at 62 means a retiree would receive a 25 percent lower monthly payout than if she worked until 66.
Ms. Reid is in some ways luckier than others. Boeing paid her a six-month severance, and she has health care benefits that cover her and her husband for $40 a month.
And she admits some regrets: she had a $180,000 balance in her 401(k) account, and paid $80,000 in penalties and taxes when she cashed it out early. She did not rein in her expenses right away. And now, her $500-a-week unemployment benefits have been exhausted.
She has since cut back, forgoing Nordstrom shopping sprees and theater subscriptions, but also cutting out red meat at home and putting off home repairs.
In order to qualify for accounting posts, she is taking an online training course in QuickBooks, a popular accounting software used by small businesses. She recently signed up for a tax course at an H&R Block tax preparation office in Seattle.
And she is plugging ahead with her current plan: to send out 600 applications to accounting firms in the area, offering her services for the next tax season. Eventually, she wants to open her own business.
With odd jobs and her husband's — albeit shriveled — earnings, she could stagger along. For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.
"You don't necessarily have to go through the door," Ms. Reid said. "You can go around it and go under it. I can be very creative. I think that I will eventually manage to pull this together."
But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.
College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.
But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.
Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.
Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.
After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy's recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.
New York Times
Patricia Reid, 57, lost her job at Boeing four years ago and has struggled to find a new position.
For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.
Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.
"There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed," said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. "I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady," she said. "It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don't even realize it."
Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their resumes often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.
Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.
The most recent recession has increased the need to extend working life. Home values, often a family's most important asset, have been battered. Stock portfolios are only now starting to recover. According to a Gallup poll in April, more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995.
Older workers who lose their jobs could pose a policy problem if they lose their ability to be self-sufficient. "That's what we should be worrying about," said Carl E. Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, "what it means to this class of the new unemployables, people who have been cast adrift at a very vulnerable part of their career and their life."
Forced early retirement imposes an intense financial strain, particularly for those at lower incomes. The recession and its aftermath have already pushed down some older workers. In figures released last week by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate among those 55 to 64 increased to 9.4 percent in 2009, from 8.6 percent in 2007.
But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse's income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.
"That's what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security," Ms. Reid said. "Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job."
As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.
Stunned and depressed, she sent out resumes, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.
Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.
As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. "If I let myself think like that all the time," she said, "I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning."
With her husband's home repair business pummeled by the housing downturn, the bills are mounting. Although the couple do not have a mortgage on their 3,000-square-foot house, they pay close to $7,000 a year in property taxes. The roof is leaking. Their utility bills can be $300 a month in the winter, even though they often keep the thermostat turned down to 50 degrees.
They could try to sell their home, but given the depressed housing market, they are reluctant.
"We are circling the drain here, and I am bailing like hell," said Ms. Reid, emitting an incongruous cackle, as if laughter is the only response to her plight. "But the boat is still sinking."
It is not just the finances that have destabilized her life.
Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. "We've both been hard workers our whole lives," said Mr. Mielock, 59. Ms. Reid sometimes rose just after 3 a.m. to make the hourlong commute to Boeing's data center in Bellevue and attended night school to earn a master's in management information systems.
"A job is more than a job, you know," Mr. Mielock said. "It's where you fit in society."
Here in the greater Seattle area, a fifth of those claiming extended unemployment benefits are 55 and older.
To help seniors polish their job-seeking skills, WorkSource, a local consortium of government and nonprofit groups, recently began offering seminars. On a recent morning, 14 people gathered in a windowless conference room at a local community college to get tips on how to age-proof their resumes and deflect questions about being overqualified.
Motivational posters hung on one wall, bearing slogans like "Failure is the path of least persistence."
Using PowerPoint slides, Liz Howland, the chipper but no-nonsense session leader, projected some common myths about older job-seekers on a screen: "Older workers are less capable of evaluating information, making decisions and problem-solving" or "Older workers are rigid and inflexible and have trouble adapting to change."
Ms. Howland, 61, ticked off the reasons those statements were inaccurate. But a clear undercurrent of anxiety ran through the room. "Is it really true that if you have the energy and the passion that they will overlook the age factor?" asked a 61-year-old man who had been laid off from a furniture maker last October.
Gallows humor reigned. As Ms. Howland — who suggested that applicants remove any dates older than 15 years from their resume — advised the group on how to finesse interview questions like "When did you have the job that helped you develop that skill?" one out-of-work journalist deadpanned: "How about 'during the 20th century?'"
During a break, Anne Richard, who declined to give her age, confessed she was afraid she would not be able to work again after losing her contract as a house director at a University of Washington sorority in June. Although she had 20 years of experience as an office clerk in Chattanooga, Tenn., she feared her technology skills had fallen behind.
"I don't feel like I can compete with kids who have been on computers all their lives," said Ms. Richard, who was sleeping on the couch of a couple she had met at church and contemplating imminent homelessness.
Older people who lose their jobs take longer to find work. In August, the average time unemployed for those 55 and older was slightly more than 39 weeks, according to the Labor Department, the longest of any age group. That is much worse than in August 1983, also after a deep recession, when someone unemployed in that age group spent an average of 27.5 weeks finding work.
At this year's pace of an average of 82,000 new jobs a month, it will take at least eight more years to create the 8 million positions lost during the recession. And that does not even allow for population growth.
Advocates for the elderly worry that younger people are more likely to fill the new jobs as well.
"I do think the longer someone is out of work, the more employers are going to question why it is that someone hasn't been able to find work," said Sara Rix, senior strategic policy adviser at AARP, the lobbying group for seniors. "Their skills have atrophied for one thing, and technology changes so rapidly that even if nothing happened to the skills that you have, they may become increasingly less relevant to the jobs that are becoming available."
In four years of job hunting, Ms. Reid has discovered that she is no longer technologically proficient. In one of a handful of interviews she has secured, for an auditing position at the Port of Seattle, she learned that the job required skills in PeopleSoft, financial software she had never used. She assumes that deficiency cost her the job.
Ms. Reid is still five years away from being eligible for Social Security. But even then, she would be drawing early, which reduces monthly payments. Taking Social Security at 62 means a retiree would receive a 25 percent lower monthly payout than if she worked until 66.
Ms. Reid is in some ways luckier than others. Boeing paid her a six-month severance, and she has health care benefits that cover her and her husband for $40 a month.
And she admits some regrets: she had a $180,000 balance in her 401(k) account, and paid $80,000 in penalties and taxes when she cashed it out early. She did not rein in her expenses right away. And now, her $500-a-week unemployment benefits have been exhausted.
She has since cut back, forgoing Nordstrom shopping sprees and theater subscriptions, but also cutting out red meat at home and putting off home repairs.
In order to qualify for accounting posts, she is taking an online training course in QuickBooks, a popular accounting software used by small businesses. She recently signed up for a tax course at an H&R Block tax preparation office in Seattle.
And she is plugging ahead with her current plan: to send out 600 applications to accounting firms in the area, offering her services for the next tax season. Eventually, she wants to open her own business.
With odd jobs and her husband's — albeit shriveled — earnings, she could stagger along. For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.
"You don't necessarily have to go through the door," Ms. Reid said. "You can go around it and go under it. I can be very creative. I think that I will eventually manage to pull this together."
Nicely Said............................
"What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter." - Terry Pratchett
Rothschild and CIA Publications Attack “Constitution-worshipers”
The editors of the Economist have declared constitutionalists mentally ill. “Indeed, there is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshipers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century,” the editors wrote on September 23. “When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim.”
The Economist is owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of England. It is run by the Economist Group, a known CIA front.
According to the Economist, the framers were aristocrats who “did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote.” The Constitution does not address the “hard questions thrown up by modern politics,” namely should gays be allowed to marry?
The Economist argument against the Constitution is the same one used by liberal academics. The document is antiquated, the product of a bygone era. The founders were afraid of “democracy taking hold,” so they crafted a document designed to exclude the common people and preserve their aristocratic position.
Globalists love democracy. It is an easy enough task to fool the people, especially these days with 24-7 media and satellite television. It is a relatively simple matter to have the benighted masses vote away their natural rights under some cooked up false pretense. “Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote,” wrote Marvin Simkin. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Soon after the Economist article appeared, the establishment publication Foreign Policy posted an article slamming the idea that we should follow the Constitution. Joshua Keating writes that he suspects “most Americans don’t realize quite how old the Constitution is by world standards,” that is to say globalist standards. In order to make his point, Keating cites an article published in the Onion, a popular satire publication.
Foreign Policy was established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank created by the “internationalist” Andrew Carnegie, who took his advice from Elihu Root, who worked to make the Council On Foreign Relations possible.
As Carroll Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, the CFR, modeled on the British Round Table Group, “penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and… foreign policy,” and peddled its globalist influence through five American newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. “The CFR is the American Branch of a society which originated in England, and which believes that national boundaries should be obliterated, and a one-world rule established,” Quigley explains.
In 2008, Foreign Policy was bought by the Washington Post Company. The Washington Post is the crown jewel of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner, who ran the Office of Special Projects — later to become part of the CIA — recruited Philip Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, to run Operation Mockingbird and subvert the free press in the United States.
The CFR wants “to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty of the national independence of the United States,” Admiral Chester Ward, a former member of the CFR, warned. In order to realize their one-world government scheme, the CFR and the ruling elite must undermine the sovereignty of the United States.
The Economist is owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of England. It is run by the Economist Group, a known CIA front.
According to the Economist, the framers were aristocrats who “did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote.” The Constitution does not address the “hard questions thrown up by modern politics,” namely should gays be allowed to marry?
The Economist argument against the Constitution is the same one used by liberal academics. The document is antiquated, the product of a bygone era. The founders were afraid of “democracy taking hold,” so they crafted a document designed to exclude the common people and preserve their aristocratic position.
Globalists love democracy. It is an easy enough task to fool the people, especially these days with 24-7 media and satellite television. It is a relatively simple matter to have the benighted masses vote away their natural rights under some cooked up false pretense. “Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote,” wrote Marvin Simkin. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Soon after the Economist article appeared, the establishment publication Foreign Policy posted an article slamming the idea that we should follow the Constitution. Joshua Keating writes that he suspects “most Americans don’t realize quite how old the Constitution is by world standards,” that is to say globalist standards. In order to make his point, Keating cites an article published in the Onion, a popular satire publication.
Foreign Policy was established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank created by the “internationalist” Andrew Carnegie, who took his advice from Elihu Root, who worked to make the Council On Foreign Relations possible.
As Carroll Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, the CFR, modeled on the British Round Table Group, “penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and… foreign policy,” and peddled its globalist influence through five American newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. “The CFR is the American Branch of a society which originated in England, and which believes that national boundaries should be obliterated, and a one-world rule established,” Quigley explains.
In 2008, Foreign Policy was bought by the Washington Post Company. The Washington Post is the crown jewel of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner, who ran the Office of Special Projects — later to become part of the CIA — recruited Philip Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, to run Operation Mockingbird and subvert the free press in the United States.
The CFR wants “to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty of the national independence of the United States,” Admiral Chester Ward, a former member of the CFR, warned. In order to realize their one-world government scheme, the CFR and the ruling elite must undermine the sovereignty of the United States.
It must also undermine and subvert the Tea Party movement and the popular move to restore the constitutional foundation of the country.
The twin articles appearing in the Economist — at the behest of Rothschild and the City of London banking elite — and Foreign Policy — controlled by the Council On Foreign Relations — are designed to make constitutionalists appear to be not only infantile idealists who idolize an archaic document that the globalists argue has no relevance in our modern era of gay marriage, but also as dangerous people who suffer from mental illness.
The twin articles appearing in the Economist — at the behest of Rothschild and the City of London banking elite — and Foreign Policy — controlled by the Council On Foreign Relations — are designed to make constitutionalists appear to be not only infantile idealists who idolize an archaic document that the globalists argue has no relevance in our modern era of gay marriage, but also as dangerous people who suffer from mental illness.
Barack Obama: the Great Unravelling of a One-Term President?
The first book about a new administration by Bob Woodward, Washington's court chronicler, usually promises to be the high watermark for an incoming commander-in-chief.
Officials are reluctant to dish the dirt because they have the chance of years of employment ahead of them. The cynic might think that a positive portrayal helps position the Watergate scribbler nicely for access next time.
It was the late conservative columnist Robert Novak who divided public figures into sources and targets. Woodward generally treats those who talk to him kindly while those who don't get a more damning verdict.
So it was of little surprise that the biggest problem Woodward must have had with his Obama's Wars was deciding how to cull the herd of White House officials eager to spill the beans.
But the clamour among staffers to present their boss and themselves (not necessarily in that order) in the best possible light has backfired spectacularly.
A president has no more solemn duty than that of being commander-in-chief. And judging from the evidence presented by Woodward, Barack Obama's view of that role is at best disquieting.
Nearly 100,000 American troops are now committed to Afghanistan but Obama's principal war aim is to withdraw and his main preoccupation is how the conflict plays domestically, particularly within his own Democratic party.
"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama says at one stage. At another he declares that "everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint".
Obama comes across as viewing his generals with thinly-disguised hostility, while at the same time acquiescing to their proposals for the escalation of the Afghan war he so wants to avoid. His arbitrary drawdown of July 2012 was a signal to the Taliban to hang on because American commitment to success was lukewarm and time-limited.
The description of Obama staffers glorying in the firing of General Stanley McChrystal because they believed it boosted the president's macho credentials (it did the opposite) brings shame on the administration.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the coverage of it is that the White House is so delusional it seems to think their man has come out of it rather well. In fact, Woodward's book will further damage Obama and could not have come at a worse time.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll finds him at an all-time low of 42 per cent approval, against 54 per cent who disapprove.
Obama has even lost Shepard Fairey, the man who created the iconic red and blue "Hope" poster of Obama's visage. Those who elected Obama, he said this week, feel cheated. "They wanted somebody who was going to fight against the status quo and I don't think that Obama has done that."
The president can't stop blaming George W Bush for anything that goes wrong but it will be the current rather than the former president who Democrats will take to task after November.
Obama scarcely helped himself this week when he responded in a CNBC "town hall" event to a black woman who said she was "exhausted of defending you" by prefacing his answer with "as I said before" – code for "you're clearly too dumb to have understood me the first time".
David Axelrod, the most civilised of Obama's closest aides, has been tasked to make nice with liberals and encourage the media to get back behind the man who was their candidate in 2008.
The result? Not much doing. When he announced his desire to "enlist" liberal bloggers for the midterms, one tore into him, accusing the White House of engaging in "hippie bashing".
Reporters were not impressed by Axelrod's demand in a Washington Post opinion piece that the press needed to investigate Republicans. These days, the White House press corps is feeling unloved by Obama's inner circle and a tad embarrassed about 2008.
In the meantime, Obama's Democratic allies on Capitol Hill are either running away as fast as they can from the president or curling up in the fetal position by postponing a congressional vote on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts – a move that makes them look both weak and cowardly.
For the first time, and despite the fact that no credible Republican candidate for 2012 has yet emerged, Obama is looking like a one-term president while one-party rule in Washington is in its death throes.
When Woodward writes his book about what is happening now, he could do worse than call it The Great Unravelling.
How Much Did 9/11 Change Things?
Did 9/11 Really “Change Everything”?
Sept 25, 2010
We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.
Is it true?
Let’s look:
The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)
The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office
Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11
The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11
Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11
Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this
Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”
The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)
The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11
The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11
The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11
Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay
It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people
So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?
Sept 25, 2010
We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.
Is it true?
Let’s look:
The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)
The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office
Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11
The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11
Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11
Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this
Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”
The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)
The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11
The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11
The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11
Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay
It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people
So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?
America's Downward Spiral = Deindustrialization
19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind
Sept 26, 2010
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial” nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?
Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America does into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.
So what happens when the debt bubble pops?
The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.
For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.
The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind….
#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.
#2 Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.
#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.
#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.
#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.
#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.
#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.
#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.
#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.
#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.
#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.
#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
So how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do something about it?
How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?
How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?
How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?
The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.
If you disagree with this article, I have a direct challenge for you. If anyone can explain how a deindustrialized America has any kind of viable economic future, please do so below in the comments section.
America is in deep, deep trouble folks. It is time to wake up.
Sept 26, 2010
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial” nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?
Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America does into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.
So what happens when the debt bubble pops?
The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.
For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.
The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind….
#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.
#2 Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.
#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.
#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.
#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.
#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.
#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.
#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.
#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.
#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.
#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.
#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
So how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do something about it?
How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?
How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?
How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?
The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.
If you disagree with this article, I have a direct challenge for you. If anyone can explain how a deindustrialized America has any kind of viable economic future, please do so below in the comments section.
America is in deep, deep trouble folks. It is time to wake up.
MUST WATCH: The Curious Case For $936 Ounce Silver.
This is getting uglier by the second. Shore up your precious metal investments and bail like hell. We're close to a bottom now, but the recovery process may be a decade in the making. God help us all......
Thursday, September 23, 2010
You Believeing Us About Gold Yet?
Gold Hits Another Record as Dollar Tumbles On Fed Announcement
It is yet another example of the indispensability of gold as a hedge against the bankster engineered economic implosion. Earlier today, the precious metal reached a new record as the dollar tumbled further on the Fed announcement it will continue its habitual manipulation of monetary policy by keeping interest rates artificially low.
Gold reached $1,290.40 an ounce at 2:43 p.m., according to Bloomberg. At the same time, the beleaguered dollar fell 1.3 percent against a basket of six major currencies. Gold has surged 17 percent this year, heading for a 10th straight annual gain.
Many gold advocates are stunned by the momentum and note that the market will soon reach the psychologically important $1,300 an ounce mark. Analysts believe the price will reach $1,500 by the end of December or during the early months of 2011.
Not only are private investors flocking to gold, but so are central banks, as former stock broker Max Keiser noted on the Alex Jones Show yesterday. “Central banks for the first time in decades are buying gold,” Keiser explained. “Up until recently they were net sellers of gold, now they are actually buying gold. So, this is another huge piece of the equation for gold.”
The ABN Amro Yellow Book, a detailed data and analysis publication that records past and possible future activities in the gold market, notes that in the past gold was used by central bankers for “reserve guarantees” and then “mobilization and portfolio management” before finally hitting “gold sales” in the 1990s and early 2000s. The VM Group consultancy in London explains that today “there is a rational case for postponing gold sales.”
In addition to western central banks, a growing list of countries have been adding to their official gold reserves in order to reduce the risks associated with their U.S. dollar-denominated holdings. China, India, Russia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and even Bangladesh are reporting gold purchases as a hedge against the falling value of the dollar.
When central banks engage in increased gold purchases, it means they are printing more fiat paper money. “The Federal Reserve Bank no longer shares M3 money supply with the public. Therefore, the public no longer knows exactly how much money is in circulation at any one time. However, the increase in gold is a pretty good barometer of how much money is being created,” writes Nicholas Santiago.
Historically, gold has been used as a hedge against severe economic conditions, so all this increased buying and hoarding of gold can be viewed as a warning signal of big trouble just up ahead.
“Gold going up means that the world financial markets are giving President Obama a vote of zero confidence because it means that the value of the dollar is collapsing in a way that crushes economies a la 1930s,” writes Gil Guignat. “Gold is the only asset class on this planet that when it goes up at this current pace, it means a very, very bad omen is in the offing in the very near term.”
In short, if you want to protect your family and retain your wealth, gold is the place to be.
It is yet another example of the indispensability of gold as a hedge against the bankster engineered economic implosion. Earlier today, the precious metal reached a new record as the dollar tumbled further on the Fed announcement it will continue its habitual manipulation of monetary policy by keeping interest rates artificially low.
Gold reached $1,290.40 an ounce at 2:43 p.m., according to Bloomberg. At the same time, the beleaguered dollar fell 1.3 percent against a basket of six major currencies. Gold has surged 17 percent this year, heading for a 10th straight annual gain.
Many gold advocates are stunned by the momentum and note that the market will soon reach the psychologically important $1,300 an ounce mark. Analysts believe the price will reach $1,500 by the end of December or during the early months of 2011.
Not only are private investors flocking to gold, but so are central banks, as former stock broker Max Keiser noted on the Alex Jones Show yesterday. “Central banks for the first time in decades are buying gold,” Keiser explained. “Up until recently they were net sellers of gold, now they are actually buying gold. So, this is another huge piece of the equation for gold.”
The ABN Amro Yellow Book, a detailed data and analysis publication that records past and possible future activities in the gold market, notes that in the past gold was used by central bankers for “reserve guarantees” and then “mobilization and portfolio management” before finally hitting “gold sales” in the 1990s and early 2000s. The VM Group consultancy in London explains that today “there is a rational case for postponing gold sales.”
In addition to western central banks, a growing list of countries have been adding to their official gold reserves in order to reduce the risks associated with their U.S. dollar-denominated holdings. China, India, Russia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and even Bangladesh are reporting gold purchases as a hedge against the falling value of the dollar.
When central banks engage in increased gold purchases, it means they are printing more fiat paper money. “The Federal Reserve Bank no longer shares M3 money supply with the public. Therefore, the public no longer knows exactly how much money is in circulation at any one time. However, the increase in gold is a pretty good barometer of how much money is being created,” writes Nicholas Santiago.
Historically, gold has been used as a hedge against severe economic conditions, so all this increased buying and hoarding of gold can be viewed as a warning signal of big trouble just up ahead.
“Gold going up means that the world financial markets are giving President Obama a vote of zero confidence because it means that the value of the dollar is collapsing in a way that crushes economies a la 1930s,” writes Gil Guignat. “Gold is the only asset class on this planet that when it goes up at this current pace, it means a very, very bad omen is in the offing in the very near term.”
In short, if you want to protect your family and retain your wealth, gold is the place to be.
These Charts Scare Me.....They Should Frighten You Too If You're An American
The Dollar Is Just Getting Crushed, And It’s Fallen Through Its August Lows
Oof. The dollar is still getting hammered, and it’s not like equities are rallying to make up for it.
Oof. The dollar is still getting hammered, and it’s not like equities are rallying to make up for it.
Our Government Masquerading As Enron
US Government 'hiding true amount of debt'
THE actual figure of the US' national debt is much higher than the official sum of $US13.4 trillion ($14.3 trillion) given by the Congressional Budget Office, according to analysts cited by the New York Post.
"The Government is lying about the amount of debt. It is engaging in Enron accounting," said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and co-author of The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future.
"The problem is we're seeing an explosion in spending," added Andrew Moylan, director of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union.
In 1980, the debt - the accumulated red ink incurred by the Federal Government - was $US909 billion. This represented some 33 per cent of gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Thirty years later, based on this year's second-quarter numbers, the CBO said the debt was $US13.4 trillion, or 92 per cent of GDP.
The CBO estimates the debt will be at $US16.5 trillion in two years, or 100.6 per cent of GDP.
But these numbers are incomplete. They do not count off-budget obligations such as required spending for Social Security and Medicare, whose programs represent a balloon payment for the Government as more Americans retire and collect benefits.
In the case of Social Security, beginning in 2016, the US Government will be paying out more than it is collecting in taxes. Without basic measures - such as payment cuts or higher payroll taxes - the system could be on the road to bankruptcy, according to officials.
"Without changes," wrote Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue, "by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted. There will be enough money only to pay about $US0.76 for each dollar of benefits."
Mr Kotlikoff and Mr Moylan agree US national debt is much more than the official $US13.4 trillion number, but they disagree over how to add up the exact number.
Mr Kotlikoff says the debt is actually $US200 trillion.
Mr Moylan says the number is likely about $US60 trillion. That is close to the figure quoted by David Walker, the US Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008. He launched a campaign to convince Americans that the federal spending and debt is a greater threat than terrorism.
But whichever figure is accurate, all three agree that the problem has worsened in the last few years. They say it is because Congress and the Administration, whether Republican or Democrat, consistently overspend.Read more: http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/us-government-hiding-true-amount-of-debt/story-e6frfkur-1225926567256#ixzz10K4PYSPs
But these numbers are incomplete. They do not count off-budget obligations such as required spending for Social Security and Medicare, whose programs represent a balloon payment for the Government as more Americans retire and collect benefits.
In the case of Social Security, beginning in 2016, the US Government will be paying out more than it is collecting in taxes. Without basic measures - such as payment cuts or higher payroll taxes - the system could be on the road to bankruptcy, according to officials.
"Without changes," wrote Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue, "by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted. There will be enough money only to pay about $US0.76 for each dollar of benefits."
Mr Kotlikoff and Mr Moylan agree US national debt is much more than the official $US13.4 trillion number, but they disagree over how to add up the exact number.
Mr Kotlikoff says the debt is actually $US200 trillion.
Mr Moylan says the number is likely about $US60 trillion. That is close to the figure quoted by David Walker, the US Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008. He launched a campaign to convince Americans that the federal spending and debt is a greater threat than terrorism.
But whichever figure is accurate, all three agree that the problem has worsened in the last few years. They say it is because Congress and the Administration, whether Republican or Democrat, consistently overspend.Read more: http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/us-government-hiding-true-amount-of-debt/story-e6frfkur-1225926567256#ixzz10K4PYSPs
Nicely Said...............
"If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else." - Dave Ramsey (whom we see as a simpleton, but even the goofs say something profound every now and then!)
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Americans Living In Delusion
Americans Enjoying Final Days of Artificial Economy
FORT LEE, N.J., Sept. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Inflation Association today released the following inflation update to its http://inflation.us/ members:
In recent days, Japan has intervened in the foreign currency market to artificially drive down the value of the yen. Japan's actions to weaken the yen have driven it from 83 to 85.73 against the U.S. dollar. Most analysts in the mainstream media are portraying this as Japan's attempt to "head off a deflation spiral." Almost everybody is applauding Japan's move, saying it was needed in order to "shore up its export-driven economy."
The truth is, although Japan claims to be helping Japanese citizens with this move, Japanese citizens are the ones who will actually suffer. Despite Japan's economy entering into recession last year, the Japanese were able to maintain their same standard of living because prices were falling due to their strong currency. Some of the largest Japanese exporters like Toyota and Sony saw their revenues decline last year by 20.8% and 12.9% respectively, but this was only bad for shareholders of these companies. Despite rapidly declining revenues for Japanese exporters, Japan's unemployment rate only reached a peak of 5.6% last year and is now down to 5.2%.
The Japanese should be happy and grateful for how strong their economy is compared to the U.S. economy. When it comes to exporters in Japan, their problem is not the strong yen, but the weak U.S. dollar. If Japanese exporters allow the U.S. dollar to collapse, their revenues will continue to decline substantially, but that is a healthy part of a free market economy. Within a year or two, a strengthening yen would allow the Japanese to spend more on their own goods, and revenues for Toyota and Sony would come back strong.
Japan's efforts to postpone a few Japanese corporations going through a brief but tough readjustment period are helping to artificially prop up the standard of living for Americans one last time. NIA believes that the Japanese better be careful what they wish for. Never before in world history has nearly every developed country been in battle with each other to have the weakest currency. Asian producing countries want their currencies to be the weakest so that they can have the honor of shipping their products to Americans who can't afford them.
Currencies are very fragile, especially when they are fiat and backed by nothing. NIA believes that nearly all countries around the world with fiat currencies are currently making the grave mistake of doing everything in their power to debase them. Even a five-year-old child, if you asked them if they want the money in their piggy bank to be worth more or less, would have the common sense to say more. The world's politicians either don't have this same common sense or they are being paid off by the management of export giants.
Although China recently made the wise decision to allow the yuan to strengthen, they haven't allowed the yuan to strengthen fast enough. China is now facing a price inflation crisis that will soon spread to the U.S. Consumer prices in China rose by 3.5% in August compared to one year ago, the largest increase in nearly two years. On a month-over-month basis (including seasonal adjustments), consumer prices in China rose by 4.8% in August over July.
Workers at a Honda plant in China recently went on strike over wages and work conditions. The Chinese have had enough of slaving in factories for $30 per week while Americans sit home on their couches, collect $400 per week in unemployment benefits, and consume the goods that the Chinese make. Chinese manufacturers are now being forced to increase the wages they pay to workers and these costs will be passed on to American importers of Chinese goods like Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart recently eliminated their "rollbacks" on grocery items in the U.S. Grocery prices at Wal-Mart rose by a shocking 5.8% in July from June. In fact, some items in Wal-Mart like a 36-ounce bottle of Windex and a 12-ounce box of Quaker Oats rose in price by 51% and 66% respectively in July over June. Considering that in 29 states, Wal-Mart controls more than half the grocery market, almost all Americans are beginning to feel the effects of massive price inflation.
With 70% of the goods sold in Wal-Mart made in China, NIA believes that Wal-Mart's massive price increases for grocery items will soon spread to all other items sold. It is crystal clear for us to see what is ahead for U.S. prices of consumer goods, yet the mainstream media continues to talk about deflation. Cotton prices have surged 28% during the past two months to their highest level in 15 years. That alone guarantees higher clothing prices, but combined with the wage situation in China, Americans could see an unprecedented surge in clothing prices in the months to come.
A massive outbreak of price inflation is already taking place all around us, as Americans enjoy their final days of our artificial economy that is being propped up by China and Japan. Some people say China and Japan continue to buy and hold U.S. treasuries because of our overpowering military presence, but when they start dumping our treasuries and the bond bubble bursts, the U.S. military regime will come to an end. A U.S. societal collapse is coming, and NIA will expose the truth in its over one hour long documentary coming in late-October. This documentary will be talked about around the world for years to come. If you would like your friends and family members to be the first to see NIA's new upcoming documentary, please tell them to become a member of NIA for free at http://inflation.us/.
We Can Do Something......
Real World Solutions To Economic Tyranny
It’s inevitable. Every person who endeavors to understand the nature of economy, central banking, fiat currency, Globalism, and elitism in our culture, every man who is truly honest with himself, comes to the same logical conclusion; the system we toil in, the system we tolerate out of habit day to day, is not only failing, it is designed to fail. Knowing this fact is difficult. The potential consequences of the situation tend to bleed into every moment of our once conventional routine. We realize that there is no going back to the old apathetic ways of viewing our world; once awake we cannot again sleep, and because we have the truth in hand, truth which affects every living human being, we are also by default made responsible for the future. We are no longer spectators caught in the swift tides of history, but participants in history’s making. We become the levy builders and breakers. We contribute to the flow of events, as well as their outcome.
This insight then begs a change in our way of life, and leads to a single arduous question:
Now that we know there is a problem, what are we going to do about it?
While knowing the truth is a tremendous step for any person, it brings little comfort without a sense of direction. People need a defined course of action, a methodology, a way of contributing to the solution. The problem is that too many people sit and wait for the solution to present itself, or wait for others to take the lead, instead of going out and finding their own answers. I have often received responses to my past articles that sound like this:
“Ok, so we know the economy is on the verge of collapse and that the government is corrupt. When are YOU going to tell us what we can do about it? What are YOU going to do about it? When are WE going to rally together and force the elites out of power?”
These are the wrong questions. What they should be asking THEMSELVES is;
“What am I going to do about it? When am I going to decide to take actions that further the betterment of our future? When am I going to stop waiting for others to tell me what to do?”
People want times, dates, clubs, protests, official representation, political parties, slogans, sign-up sheets and bake sales, and most of all, they want a plan, a prefabricated plan clearly delineating the future of the movement. In the Liberty Movement, however, there is no such thing as a strategy set in stone, nor should there be. The primary reason being, the Liberty Movement thrives on individual action, not collectivist action.
We would all love to have the remedy to our many ills packaged and bottled and sold to us like so much aspirin. This is not going to happen and I hope people stop holding their breath. In our situation, the only solutions that come easy are those that benefit the establishment, and not us. In fact, globalist peddlers today are lining up in droves to offer you their “leadership”, and an easy way out. Some people buy in, simply because they’ve never been forced to think for themselves, and they can’t fathom starting now, especially when it comes to something as seemingly complex and overarching as economics.
I have no easy solutions to offer here. I have no magic tricks or cure-alls. All I have is the ability to clearly present the hard choices available to us. All I have is a manner of thinking that could stop globalism in its tracks, but the way this philosophy is enacted is up to each and every American individual, and not up to me. Effective real world solutions start with a powerful root principle. This is mine:
Provide for yourself and for others those human necessities the oppressive system cannot or will not. Through this, you make the system obsolete. Eventually, the system will either have to come after you, or be forced to conform to you. In either case, you benefit.
Now, let’s examine how this principle works (especially in terms of economics), how it can be implemented, as well as those strategies that do more harm than good…
“Solutions” That Solve Nothing
Before we look at more effective measures in fighting against economic and political manipulation, it is probably a good idea to make ourselves aware of those solutions being presented to the public that will not work, or are meant to mislead. There are too many variations to cover in a single article, so I will attempt to list what I believe are the foremost prominent scams, shams, and boondoggles, below.
Incentives: Government incentives are a wash. Their only purpose is to prolong the inevitable by propping up certain sectors of the economy with more debt we cannot afford. Look at how the housing market tanked even further after the government ended its homebuyer tax credit plan. Look at the car tax credit and “cash for clunkers”. It was completely ineffective in revitalizing auto sales to sustainable levels. Government incentive programs fail. Period.
Centralization: Centralization is a philosophy that draws on our tendency to defer our personal responsibilities to others. It is the exact opposite of the principle I described above. More centralization is the source of our current economic problems, not the solution. By condensing the power of financial regulation and control into the hands of a minority of unaccountable men, like the private Federal Reserve, we relinquish our right to participate in the decision making process, and we reduce the value of the individual in our society overall.
Many people look for leadership, regardless how corrupt, just to avoid the dreadful proposition of having to shape their own destinies. In a new America free from globalism, this neurotic aversion to self-determination must end, and the average person must start taking on more responsibility for himself and his surroundings, not less. Even now, the IMF and World Bank along with financial elites here in the U.S. are suggesting world financial regulation and world government as a way to divert the carnage brought about by faulty policies those same organizations designed! The only way this nightmare will be implemented successfully is if you, the everyday American, continue to fear taking charge of your own life. Bigger government has never solved any of our social problems, it has only made them more pronounced. Why would anyone believe the concept of Global Government is any better?
One World Currency: There is still a host of naysayers in the mainstream financial world that deny there is any plan whatsoever for a one world currency. Just to be clear; the IMF has OPENLY admitted that its goal is the implementation of the SDR (Special Drawing Rights) as a world reserve currency to replace the Dollar in international trade, and to eventually surpass all currencies as the new “global currency”. You can read these admissions in the IMF’s own press releases:
http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2010/051110.htm
Other analysts admit that the IMF has plans on the drawing board for a global currency, but claim such a move would never be instituted by the U.S. government. In fact, the U.S. has some of the highest SDR allocations of any country in its reserves. And now, even the U.S. Post Office is listing the SDR in its priority mail exchange rate tables:
http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immc3_007.htm
Now, if the U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency, and is supposedly going to be the world reserve currency for years to come as mainstream analysts suggest, then why on Earth would our Treasury feel the need to allocate any SDR’s at all, and why would our own Postal Service use an SDR exchange rate table? Why is the SDR being treated as a viable currency today when skeptics claim that the SDR is not a currency at all? If the dollar is as strong as the establishment suggests, why are they obviously preparing for the rise of the SDR?
There are also those who suggest that a collapse in the Dollar would only damage the SDR because the SDR’s value is built on a “basket” of currencies which includes the dollar, making the implementation of the SDR as a global currency impossible These people don’t seem to understand how currency markets work, let alone how the IMF works.
In currency markets, buying power is generally shifted or dispersed, and not necessarily destroyed. As the U.S. dollar falls, other currencies gain ground. A good example is the Japanese Yen and its recent rise to a 15 year high against the Greenback (the Japanese are now attempting to intervene in the Yen). The Chinese Yuan, not yet included in the SDR basket, is set for a meteoric increase in value, especially if China decides to dump their U.S. Treasury reserves, a move that would likely buy them a spot at the SDR table.
A fall in the Dollar changes nothing in the SDR, it only leaves a hole that other countries will gladly fill with their own currencies.
Also, the SDR is not predicated on any hard fast rules. Many analysts today don’t comprehend this. Frankly, the SDR is whatever the IMF says it is! In the early 1970’s, the IMF used the SDR as a security representing a set amount of gold. In fact, the SDR used to be called “paper gold”. Then, they changed it to a basket of world currencies. Tomorrow, it could be something completely different. This is what happens when you give unelected central bankers unmitigated control over a financial instrument. They do whatever they please with it regardless of normal economic traditions or “codes of honor”. Any arguments that don’t take this fact into account are not even worth considering.
To be clear, global currency is being set up for implementation NOW, not ten years from now, or twenty, but now. Any acceptance of a global currency by the masses will result in complete economic centralization. The Federal Reserve is currently unaccountable, but they are still subject to legal audit and dissolution if the American people organize enough resistance and exert enough pressure to make it happen. A global currency is likely to leave no avenue for the people to question its viability or change its foundation. The IMF is outside the jurisdiction of any country or society, making it utterly immune to litigation, and regulation, and more prone to moral hazard. To hand over that much streamlined power to such a monstrosity in the “hope” that it will act in our best interests is pure insanity! Why not put Charles Manson in charge of a Cub Scout troop while we’re on a roll…
Digital Currency: About a month ago I was approached through email by a man representing an organization called ‘TGL’. He asked me if I would be interested in participating in a project called “Green Light”, which at first glance appears to be a sort of community service program centered not in local communities, but digital communities on the web. The goal, he said, was essentially to meld web communities with local communities until they worked in tandem towards the same directive. This would be accomplished by introducing a digital currency called “L”, which would create the incentives necessary to influence public participation. You can see a video commercial for Green Light here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fGGKDb7qXY&feature=player_embeddedI was intrigued by the concept initially because of the method by which “L” was given value. Basically, “L” is backed not by commodities such as gold or silver, not by traditional debt like the Dollar, but by the potential labor of those involved in the program. What this means is, the value of their digital currency relies on the stock of talents and skills of the people who also use L to purchase other people’s talents and skills. It all sounds quite symbiotic and very “green”, however, I have declined to participate, and here’s why…
While it is entirely possible that the designers of the concept have the best intentions and truly hope to stop the economic collapse, the problem is that their “solution” relies upon the creation of a currency which is even less tangible than paper fiat. Digital currency is perhaps the ultimate goal of central banks, because it diminishes all sense of fiscal discipline, not just from banking, but from society at large. One only needs to look up the amount of credit card debt held by the average American to see that digital currency promotes catastrophic financial bubbles. It also offers ultimate control over the finances of every citizen at the push of a button.
Next, the collectivist tone of the commercial and the program is obvious. While TGL is only a web based program for now, it was related to me that the end purpose was for Green Light to go global. Imagine an economy in which it is a cultural taboo NOT to participate in the collective because to refrain actually damages the whole. To not participate in Green Light diminishes the value of “L”, and thus diminishes the strength of the digital economy. Today, we call people who refuse to participate in our labor pool “bums”, or “freeloaders”, but in an economy totally dependent on a labor backed digital currency, freeloaders or peaceful non-conformists might be called “criminals”. The representative from TGL even compared Green Light to the world of ‘Star Trek’. Yikes…
Finally, the primary reason I will not participate in this program is because, as the representative admitted openly to me, Green Light was funded in part by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF is a globalist organization supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. CEO’s and former CEO’s of globalist corporations like General Electric, Dupont, Coca Cola, and the Ford Foundation sit on its board:
http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/board/
Why is an elitist front group like the WWF, a supposed environmental conservation club, interested in funding digital currency projects? I suppose even if I could ask them directly I would not expect an honest answer, which leaves one only to speculate, using common sense, and the history of elitist influence on economy as a guide…
Anti-Industrial Retro-Egalitarian Theosophic Humanist Technocratic Fruity Tootie: As you can see, this is a catch all category for those people who are no longer grounded in reality, designing solutions that are so far outside of what is actually applicable they become a distraction from true progress. For some reason, certain people believe that in order to solve our globalist dilemma we need to reinvent the wheel. Sovereignty must go. Religion must go. Capitalism must go. Industry must go. The concept of currency must go. 80% of the world’s population must go. In some cases even the pursuit of new technologies must go. According to this crowd, humanity really had it great back when we were all dirt farmers and “one with nature”. I hate to break it to them, but society without innovation is a nightmare. They should just take a trip to the undeveloped parts of Africa and live in a starving village for a few years to see if it’s as romantic as they envision.
Invariably, these people see themselves as “misunderstood geniuses”, and blame the rest of humanity for our economic troubles, instead of the elites who engineered the whole process of collapse and centralization. When challenged, they act as though you are simply too stupid to grasp the majesty of their ideas.
Industry can never be erased. Human curiosity is too powerful a force to be held back. Currency is a product of intricate economy. If you exist solely in a village with little outside trade, then barter alone is fine. However, as soon as you begin expanding trade beyond the borders of your town square, you are going to need a better mechanism than barter. Currency as a concept is not the demon creation of elitists; it is the logical common sense extension of growing trade. “Currency” is not the problem, elitist controlled currency is the problem. Remove minority control by elites from the picture, and you will see true free markets in action. I do find it interesting though that technocrats and anti-humanists always attempt to divert the blame away from the men making the decisions that negatively affect our culture and towards “concepts” as the culprit. As if money itself is the source of evil, rather than those individuals or groups who misuse money for destructive purposes.
Again, this is all a distraction from the real world solutions available to us without wiping the slate entirely clean.
Real Solutions For Regular Americans
The basic premise of my solution to globalism is one of non-participation. As I talked about above, we must provide for ourselves and for others those human necessities the corrupt system cannot or will not. This means, if the system denies us meaningful community, we must build a meaningful community for ourselves. If the system denies us a stable currency, then we must start using our own. If the system denies us the truth and honest news providers, then we must establish and support our own information networks. The system, especially if it is a globalist collectivist one, requires that the masses rely on it. It requires that people NEED the system in order to survive. If people no longer rely on the system for their survival, the system becomes useless, and fades away. This can be done on an individual basis, and requires no traditional and structured organization. Let’s look at possible methods for applying this idea.
Alternative News: This solution is already in action and is a perfect example of the effectiveness of non-participation in the system. Right now, the ratings and viewership of mass media sources is crumbling, especially in terms of economic news. Alternative web news traffic is exploding. By providing the truth (a human necessity) we in the alternative media offered what the system would not. In response, millions of people have started to turn away from the system run media to get what they require. It’s very simple. We did not need to organize mass protests, riots, or guerilla takeovers of newsrooms. We did not need billions of dollars to buy a television network. We did not need to “get on the inside”, as some people humorously suggest, and try to leak the truth in tiny tidbits so that the corporate oligarchs wouldn’t notice. All we needed to do to take down the MSM was to make readily available that information which they kept hidden.
By providing alternative sources of information and by pointing out elitist activities while they are still in initial stages, we can also preempt their plans. By pointing out what they are doing while they are doing it, the globalists are forced to decide whether to continue their action to its end point and risk being exposed further to the public, or to stop before finishing and lay another plan to rest in the dustbin. Either way, we win.
This method can be applied to many more areas besides media…
Stop Participating In Banks: If you are a business owner with a lot of capital influx, this solution may be more difficult to follow. But, if you are a regular working stiff like me, this can be done easily. I have not had a bank account in four years and I have organized my expenses better than I did when I had accounts. While some banks may not be knowingly participating in the problem, all banks are under the purview of the Federal Reserve, which IS knowingly part of the problem. Banks create and loan money out of thin air, then charge people interest for the money that cost them nothing to make. By closing your bank accounts, you at least remove your part in the illusion that banks operate on reserves at all, as well as diminish their ability to abuse the capital you are providing them. Not to mention, you stop paying bank fees, you stop relying on debit cards and checks which saves you money, and, you protect yourself from a bank holiday. As we have covered on many occasions, the FDIC is broke, and when it finally goes under, there will be a run on banks. Better to have your money out now than be one of those in the frantic crowd begging the bank to open its doors so you can buy groceries.
As far as securing your money, unless you have millions, it’s clear-cut; just make a hiding place and stow it without telling anyone where it is. If you’re worried about your house burning down and your savings along with it, get a fireproof safe. The more people close their accounts, the less influence the banks have over our capital. It also exposes the fact that banks actually have little physical cash to back the accounts they list as holdings. If enough people do this, the false banking system itself could implode, which sounds disastrous, however, the fact remains that we cannot replace the corrupt system with an honest system until the corrupt system is removed.
Stop Participating In The Dollar: The dollar is done. Currently, House lawmakers are discussing trade sanctions against China for currency manipulation, and Japan has just intervened in its own currency this week:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-15/japan-intervenes-for-first-time-since-2004-as-yen-surge-threatens-recovery.html
This intervention was apparently unilateral, meaning it will not be supported by the U.S. and Europe (as we predicted in our last article). Where is this headed? I have no doubt we will see trade wars and currency wars between the West and Asia relatively soon:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68D12320100914
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/currency-wars-set-to-break-out/story-e6frg9qo-1225919825846The U.S. Government may put on a happy face initially for Japan, and they may not immediately go after China, but it will happen eventually, especially as the U.S. economy continues to degrade. The government will have to offer a scapegoat, and China is likely to be it, along with Japan if they continue intervention. This will result in a Treasury bond dump by China, which they have been blatantly preparing for the past three years. The dollar will collapse, guaranteed.
How can you make a difference in such a massive problem? Place your savings in commodities like gold and silver.
If we are to end the tyranny of fiat, we have to have an alternative currency. Right now, precious metals are the best option. Gold has recently sprinted past previous records and is now holding around $1270 an ounce. This is just the beginning. I would not be surprised to see gold at around $1350 to $1400 by this winter. As the dollar continues to degrade, and as inflation becomes a reality, the best way to protect your savings will be through PM’s.
Skeptics will argue that gold is inherently “valueless”. I always respond by asking them how much more “value” they think their paper dollars have. Everyone wants to attack gold, but conversely, no one wants to actually compare the benefits of gold to fiat. I also usually refer people who parrot MSM talking points on gold to the early writings of Alan Greenspan, before he was sucked into the maniacal carnival death cult otherwise known as the Federal Reserve:
http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html
I have heard the argument that because we are facing a deflationary collapse, gold is a bad investment. First off, we are NOT in a traditional deflationary collapse. If you want to see one, go to Japan, where prices are actually deflating. Here in the U.S. prices on goods and commodities are rising, in some cases 25% or more over the past year:
http://www.crbtrader.com/crbindex/data.asp
Some who see rising prices claim that this is still deflation, and that prices are rising due to manipulation. I think it much more likely, as has been proven with gold and silver, that prices are being manipulated DOWN in most cases, not up. In fact, many retailers will absorb wholesale price increases on goods just to keep shelf prices stable in the hopes of maintaining their customer base. And yet, prices have still increased despite this manipulation since the crisis began. This is inflation. Analysts need to stop clinging to the typical idea of deflation and inflation and look at the situation as it is. While some elements of the economy are deflating, like housing, this does not mean that housing is any longer a good indicator of deflation in the rest of the economy. What we are seeing are elements of both inflation and deflation at the same time (and no, they don’t cancel each other out). Gold has held its own and will hold its own exactly because currencies around the world are being devalued and even greater inflation is a very real possibility.
Eventually, once the dollar and the global bankers are out of the picture, a gold backed currency could be implemented much like the currency we used rather successfully up until 1913 when the Federal Reserve was established and we slowly lost control over our money.
Buying gold and silver though is only a start…
Start An Alternative Economy: Individuals can put this into action by building barter and trade networks in their communities. Skills, labor, and goods can be traded by neighbors without government influence or interference in transactions. This can also be expanded to the web, and some people with ingenuity have done just that, including the ‘We Trade Network’, which you can view here (Special thanks to Catherine Austin Fitts for posting this to her website, Solari.com):
http://www.wetradenetwork.com/what.php
The barter network keeps wealth in communities and out of the corporate apparatus. It also allows us to be less affected by any economic collapse that does occur in the globalist system, because we will have already constructed our own system outside of its sphere of influence. Barter and trade alone are not enough though, and to be truly effective as an alternative community, we need industry.
Start A Micro-Industry: There are many savvy business people in the Liberty Movement; those that could establish a gold and silver based currency network, and those that have the means to create not titanic corporations, but at least micro-industries within their own communities. This starts with a standardization of payment.
If Liberty Movement business leaders began accepting gold and silver as payment for goods and services instead of requiring customers to exchange their PM’s for dollars before hand, this would go a long way towards building an alternative economy. If Liberty Movement Business leaders then started giving their employees the option of being paid in gold and silver instead of dollars, it would make an even bigger impression. Given the fact that the Liberty Movement is growing exponentially every year, and the fact that the dollar is likely to degrade heavily soon, this is also good business sense. It would only take a few influential men to initiate this process.
Those who wish to start a business in their communities and have sufficient space can organize local garden trade, solar power grids, furniture making, tool making, even small electronics outfits or telephone companies. The point is to separate oneself from the diseased system and start a healthy one, one community at a time. This is not difficult. It only requires that people stop thinking about taking action, and actually take action.Support Constitutional Candidates: Vote for true Constitutionalists and proponents of limited government. Run for office yourself! Even if the deck is stacked against us in this regard, we should still try. Promote 10th Amendment rights of states, and your local sheriff (as long as he’s a good guy). Anything non-Federal should be pushed to the forefront of discussion. This is, in a way, another form on non-participation, because we are creating a political dynamic outside the system that is still influential on the system. Again, if the establishment will not provide honest candidates, or honest parties, we must provide our own.
Become Self Reliant: Supporting liberty based candidates is certainly worth doing, but it is not nearly as important as making yourself independent. You do not need large organizations with designated leaders and extensive funding to help you find meaning, or to further the cause of truth. That is something that can and should be pursued first and foremost by you alone. Organization comes later. It grows upon the works and deeds of individuals invested in a common idea. Freedom is a powerful common idea.
Something as unassuming as a personal garden can lead to a strong sense of self reliance, and there is no rule that says you have to start big. You just have to start somewhere.
Revolution?
The beauty of Non-Participation is that it is a revolutionary act that only makes us less threatening in the eyes of the uninformed, which is not what the establishment wants. I have already seen several MSM articles describing Tea Party candidates as “insurgents” (terrorists):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704190704575490263482050010.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/14/september-14-primary-elec_n_715694.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-14/tea-party-backed-insurgent-pushes-for-upset-in-delaware-primary.html
This kind of propaganda is a natural outgrowth of the system’s inability to cope with the idea that the people are no longer reliant upon it. By separating ourselves from the system, we diminish it, make it weak. In the case of the MSM, the alternative media has in some ways forced the system to let more truth filter down to the public just to keep people watching their garbage. We are gradually forcing them to conform to the truth. Unfortunately, I suspect this will not be the case in other fields.
Another option open to the establishment is the use of violence. This will be the likely reaction to the Liberty Movement’s efforts in politics and economy. Yet again, we benefit. Through non-participation, we force the elites to attack us, or to implement laws so outrageous as to be interpreted as an attack on the public. The people are already being victimized by the establishment, but if we as a movement or as individuals were to turn towards violence as an initial solution, we would be seen as the “bad guys”. This would only help the elites. We also do not want a French or Communist style revolution with angry mobs and guillotines that results in greater tyranny. What we want is an American Revolution. The Founding Fathers didn’t cross the ocean to go and lynch mob the British, they forced the British to make a choice; to leave the American independent states alone, or to come after them. By declaring themselves separate and thus no longer reliant on the British elites, American revolutionaries became defenders, not aggressors or terrorists.
By creating an economic alternative to the current system, we force the elites to make a choice. We become the defenders, and the establishment is revealed as the aggressor it really is. If we are attacked, then any violence we do reciprocate would be in self-defense, which is not only an understandable survival instinct but also a perfectly honorable response. This is the way to expand public support for liberty based concepts. This is the way to bring down despots.
In the end, it is up to you. Will you walk away from this article and continue waiting for the Liberty Movement to move you, or will you take action and progress the movement yourself? Will you make those first steps towards ending your reliance on a system that is designed to hurt you and your family, or will you sit still and wait for it to do so? Before you can force the elites to make their choice, you must make your own. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. What you don’t want, is for a stranger to one day make the choice for you…
It’s inevitable. Every person who endeavors to understand the nature of economy, central banking, fiat currency, Globalism, and elitism in our culture, every man who is truly honest with himself, comes to the same logical conclusion; the system we toil in, the system we tolerate out of habit day to day, is not only failing, it is designed to fail. Knowing this fact is difficult. The potential consequences of the situation tend to bleed into every moment of our once conventional routine. We realize that there is no going back to the old apathetic ways of viewing our world; once awake we cannot again sleep, and because we have the truth in hand, truth which affects every living human being, we are also by default made responsible for the future. We are no longer spectators caught in the swift tides of history, but participants in history’s making. We become the levy builders and breakers. We contribute to the flow of events, as well as their outcome.
This insight then begs a change in our way of life, and leads to a single arduous question:
Now that we know there is a problem, what are we going to do about it?
While knowing the truth is a tremendous step for any person, it brings little comfort without a sense of direction. People need a defined course of action, a methodology, a way of contributing to the solution. The problem is that too many people sit and wait for the solution to present itself, or wait for others to take the lead, instead of going out and finding their own answers. I have often received responses to my past articles that sound like this:
“Ok, so we know the economy is on the verge of collapse and that the government is corrupt. When are YOU going to tell us what we can do about it? What are YOU going to do about it? When are WE going to rally together and force the elites out of power?”
These are the wrong questions. What they should be asking THEMSELVES is;
“What am I going to do about it? When am I going to decide to take actions that further the betterment of our future? When am I going to stop waiting for others to tell me what to do?”
People want times, dates, clubs, protests, official representation, political parties, slogans, sign-up sheets and bake sales, and most of all, they want a plan, a prefabricated plan clearly delineating the future of the movement. In the Liberty Movement, however, there is no such thing as a strategy set in stone, nor should there be. The primary reason being, the Liberty Movement thrives on individual action, not collectivist action.
We would all love to have the remedy to our many ills packaged and bottled and sold to us like so much aspirin. This is not going to happen and I hope people stop holding their breath. In our situation, the only solutions that come easy are those that benefit the establishment, and not us. In fact, globalist peddlers today are lining up in droves to offer you their “leadership”, and an easy way out. Some people buy in, simply because they’ve never been forced to think for themselves, and they can’t fathom starting now, especially when it comes to something as seemingly complex and overarching as economics.
I have no easy solutions to offer here. I have no magic tricks or cure-alls. All I have is the ability to clearly present the hard choices available to us. All I have is a manner of thinking that could stop globalism in its tracks, but the way this philosophy is enacted is up to each and every American individual, and not up to me. Effective real world solutions start with a powerful root principle. This is mine:
Provide for yourself and for others those human necessities the oppressive system cannot or will not. Through this, you make the system obsolete. Eventually, the system will either have to come after you, or be forced to conform to you. In either case, you benefit.
Now, let’s examine how this principle works (especially in terms of economics), how it can be implemented, as well as those strategies that do more harm than good…
“Solutions” That Solve Nothing
Before we look at more effective measures in fighting against economic and political manipulation, it is probably a good idea to make ourselves aware of those solutions being presented to the public that will not work, or are meant to mislead. There are too many variations to cover in a single article, so I will attempt to list what I believe are the foremost prominent scams, shams, and boondoggles, below.
Incentives: Government incentives are a wash. Their only purpose is to prolong the inevitable by propping up certain sectors of the economy with more debt we cannot afford. Look at how the housing market tanked even further after the government ended its homebuyer tax credit plan. Look at the car tax credit and “cash for clunkers”. It was completely ineffective in revitalizing auto sales to sustainable levels. Government incentive programs fail. Period.
Centralization: Centralization is a philosophy that draws on our tendency to defer our personal responsibilities to others. It is the exact opposite of the principle I described above. More centralization is the source of our current economic problems, not the solution. By condensing the power of financial regulation and control into the hands of a minority of unaccountable men, like the private Federal Reserve, we relinquish our right to participate in the decision making process, and we reduce the value of the individual in our society overall.
Many people look for leadership, regardless how corrupt, just to avoid the dreadful proposition of having to shape their own destinies. In a new America free from globalism, this neurotic aversion to self-determination must end, and the average person must start taking on more responsibility for himself and his surroundings, not less. Even now, the IMF and World Bank along with financial elites here in the U.S. are suggesting world financial regulation and world government as a way to divert the carnage brought about by faulty policies those same organizations designed! The only way this nightmare will be implemented successfully is if you, the everyday American, continue to fear taking charge of your own life. Bigger government has never solved any of our social problems, it has only made them more pronounced. Why would anyone believe the concept of Global Government is any better?
One World Currency: There is still a host of naysayers in the mainstream financial world that deny there is any plan whatsoever for a one world currency. Just to be clear; the IMF has OPENLY admitted that its goal is the implementation of the SDR (Special Drawing Rights) as a world reserve currency to replace the Dollar in international trade, and to eventually surpass all currencies as the new “global currency”. You can read these admissions in the IMF’s own press releases:
http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2010/051110.htm
Other analysts admit that the IMF has plans on the drawing board for a global currency, but claim such a move would never be instituted by the U.S. government. In fact, the U.S. has some of the highest SDR allocations of any country in its reserves. And now, even the U.S. Post Office is listing the SDR in its priority mail exchange rate tables:
http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immc3_007.htm
Now, if the U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency, and is supposedly going to be the world reserve currency for years to come as mainstream analysts suggest, then why on Earth would our Treasury feel the need to allocate any SDR’s at all, and why would our own Postal Service use an SDR exchange rate table? Why is the SDR being treated as a viable currency today when skeptics claim that the SDR is not a currency at all? If the dollar is as strong as the establishment suggests, why are they obviously preparing for the rise of the SDR?
There are also those who suggest that a collapse in the Dollar would only damage the SDR because the SDR’s value is built on a “basket” of currencies which includes the dollar, making the implementation of the SDR as a global currency impossible These people don’t seem to understand how currency markets work, let alone how the IMF works.
In currency markets, buying power is generally shifted or dispersed, and not necessarily destroyed. As the U.S. dollar falls, other currencies gain ground. A good example is the Japanese Yen and its recent rise to a 15 year high against the Greenback (the Japanese are now attempting to intervene in the Yen). The Chinese Yuan, not yet included in the SDR basket, is set for a meteoric increase in value, especially if China decides to dump their U.S. Treasury reserves, a move that would likely buy them a spot at the SDR table.
A fall in the Dollar changes nothing in the SDR, it only leaves a hole that other countries will gladly fill with their own currencies.
Also, the SDR is not predicated on any hard fast rules. Many analysts today don’t comprehend this. Frankly, the SDR is whatever the IMF says it is! In the early 1970’s, the IMF used the SDR as a security representing a set amount of gold. In fact, the SDR used to be called “paper gold”. Then, they changed it to a basket of world currencies. Tomorrow, it could be something completely different. This is what happens when you give unelected central bankers unmitigated control over a financial instrument. They do whatever they please with it regardless of normal economic traditions or “codes of honor”. Any arguments that don’t take this fact into account are not even worth considering.
To be clear, global currency is being set up for implementation NOW, not ten years from now, or twenty, but now. Any acceptance of a global currency by the masses will result in complete economic centralization. The Federal Reserve is currently unaccountable, but they are still subject to legal audit and dissolution if the American people organize enough resistance and exert enough pressure to make it happen. A global currency is likely to leave no avenue for the people to question its viability or change its foundation. The IMF is outside the jurisdiction of any country or society, making it utterly immune to litigation, and regulation, and more prone to moral hazard. To hand over that much streamlined power to such a monstrosity in the “hope” that it will act in our best interests is pure insanity! Why not put Charles Manson in charge of a Cub Scout troop while we’re on a roll…
Digital Currency: About a month ago I was approached through email by a man representing an organization called ‘TGL’. He asked me if I would be interested in participating in a project called “Green Light”, which at first glance appears to be a sort of community service program centered not in local communities, but digital communities on the web. The goal, he said, was essentially to meld web communities with local communities until they worked in tandem towards the same directive. This would be accomplished by introducing a digital currency called “L”, which would create the incentives necessary to influence public participation. You can see a video commercial for Green Light here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fGGKDb7qXY&feature=player_embeddedI was intrigued by the concept initially because of the method by which “L” was given value. Basically, “L” is backed not by commodities such as gold or silver, not by traditional debt like the Dollar, but by the potential labor of those involved in the program. What this means is, the value of their digital currency relies on the stock of talents and skills of the people who also use L to purchase other people’s talents and skills. It all sounds quite symbiotic and very “green”, however, I have declined to participate, and here’s why…
While it is entirely possible that the designers of the concept have the best intentions and truly hope to stop the economic collapse, the problem is that their “solution” relies upon the creation of a currency which is even less tangible than paper fiat. Digital currency is perhaps the ultimate goal of central banks, because it diminishes all sense of fiscal discipline, not just from banking, but from society at large. One only needs to look up the amount of credit card debt held by the average American to see that digital currency promotes catastrophic financial bubbles. It also offers ultimate control over the finances of every citizen at the push of a button.
Next, the collectivist tone of the commercial and the program is obvious. While TGL is only a web based program for now, it was related to me that the end purpose was for Green Light to go global. Imagine an economy in which it is a cultural taboo NOT to participate in the collective because to refrain actually damages the whole. To not participate in Green Light diminishes the value of “L”, and thus diminishes the strength of the digital economy. Today, we call people who refuse to participate in our labor pool “bums”, or “freeloaders”, but in an economy totally dependent on a labor backed digital currency, freeloaders or peaceful non-conformists might be called “criminals”. The representative from TGL even compared Green Light to the world of ‘Star Trek’. Yikes…
Finally, the primary reason I will not participate in this program is because, as the representative admitted openly to me, Green Light was funded in part by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF is a globalist organization supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. CEO’s and former CEO’s of globalist corporations like General Electric, Dupont, Coca Cola, and the Ford Foundation sit on its board:
http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/board/
Why is an elitist front group like the WWF, a supposed environmental conservation club, interested in funding digital currency projects? I suppose even if I could ask them directly I would not expect an honest answer, which leaves one only to speculate, using common sense, and the history of elitist influence on economy as a guide…
Anti-Industrial Retro-Egalitarian Theosophic Humanist Technocratic Fruity Tootie: As you can see, this is a catch all category for those people who are no longer grounded in reality, designing solutions that are so far outside of what is actually applicable they become a distraction from true progress. For some reason, certain people believe that in order to solve our globalist dilemma we need to reinvent the wheel. Sovereignty must go. Religion must go. Capitalism must go. Industry must go. The concept of currency must go. 80% of the world’s population must go. In some cases even the pursuit of new technologies must go. According to this crowd, humanity really had it great back when we were all dirt farmers and “one with nature”. I hate to break it to them, but society without innovation is a nightmare. They should just take a trip to the undeveloped parts of Africa and live in a starving village for a few years to see if it’s as romantic as they envision.
Invariably, these people see themselves as “misunderstood geniuses”, and blame the rest of humanity for our economic troubles, instead of the elites who engineered the whole process of collapse and centralization. When challenged, they act as though you are simply too stupid to grasp the majesty of their ideas.
Industry can never be erased. Human curiosity is too powerful a force to be held back. Currency is a product of intricate economy. If you exist solely in a village with little outside trade, then barter alone is fine. However, as soon as you begin expanding trade beyond the borders of your town square, you are going to need a better mechanism than barter. Currency as a concept is not the demon creation of elitists; it is the logical common sense extension of growing trade. “Currency” is not the problem, elitist controlled currency is the problem. Remove minority control by elites from the picture, and you will see true free markets in action. I do find it interesting though that technocrats and anti-humanists always attempt to divert the blame away from the men making the decisions that negatively affect our culture and towards “concepts” as the culprit. As if money itself is the source of evil, rather than those individuals or groups who misuse money for destructive purposes.
Again, this is all a distraction from the real world solutions available to us without wiping the slate entirely clean.
Real Solutions For Regular Americans
The basic premise of my solution to globalism is one of non-participation. As I talked about above, we must provide for ourselves and for others those human necessities the corrupt system cannot or will not. This means, if the system denies us meaningful community, we must build a meaningful community for ourselves. If the system denies us a stable currency, then we must start using our own. If the system denies us the truth and honest news providers, then we must establish and support our own information networks. The system, especially if it is a globalist collectivist one, requires that the masses rely on it. It requires that people NEED the system in order to survive. If people no longer rely on the system for their survival, the system becomes useless, and fades away. This can be done on an individual basis, and requires no traditional and structured organization. Let’s look at possible methods for applying this idea.
Alternative News: This solution is already in action and is a perfect example of the effectiveness of non-participation in the system. Right now, the ratings and viewership of mass media sources is crumbling, especially in terms of economic news. Alternative web news traffic is exploding. By providing the truth (a human necessity) we in the alternative media offered what the system would not. In response, millions of people have started to turn away from the system run media to get what they require. It’s very simple. We did not need to organize mass protests, riots, or guerilla takeovers of newsrooms. We did not need billions of dollars to buy a television network. We did not need to “get on the inside”, as some people humorously suggest, and try to leak the truth in tiny tidbits so that the corporate oligarchs wouldn’t notice. All we needed to do to take down the MSM was to make readily available that information which they kept hidden.
By providing alternative sources of information and by pointing out elitist activities while they are still in initial stages, we can also preempt their plans. By pointing out what they are doing while they are doing it, the globalists are forced to decide whether to continue their action to its end point and risk being exposed further to the public, or to stop before finishing and lay another plan to rest in the dustbin. Either way, we win.
This method can be applied to many more areas besides media…
Stop Participating In Banks: If you are a business owner with a lot of capital influx, this solution may be more difficult to follow. But, if you are a regular working stiff like me, this can be done easily. I have not had a bank account in four years and I have organized my expenses better than I did when I had accounts. While some banks may not be knowingly participating in the problem, all banks are under the purview of the Federal Reserve, which IS knowingly part of the problem. Banks create and loan money out of thin air, then charge people interest for the money that cost them nothing to make. By closing your bank accounts, you at least remove your part in the illusion that banks operate on reserves at all, as well as diminish their ability to abuse the capital you are providing them. Not to mention, you stop paying bank fees, you stop relying on debit cards and checks which saves you money, and, you protect yourself from a bank holiday. As we have covered on many occasions, the FDIC is broke, and when it finally goes under, there will be a run on banks. Better to have your money out now than be one of those in the frantic crowd begging the bank to open its doors so you can buy groceries.
As far as securing your money, unless you have millions, it’s clear-cut; just make a hiding place and stow it without telling anyone where it is. If you’re worried about your house burning down and your savings along with it, get a fireproof safe. The more people close their accounts, the less influence the banks have over our capital. It also exposes the fact that banks actually have little physical cash to back the accounts they list as holdings. If enough people do this, the false banking system itself could implode, which sounds disastrous, however, the fact remains that we cannot replace the corrupt system with an honest system until the corrupt system is removed.
Stop Participating In The Dollar: The dollar is done. Currently, House lawmakers are discussing trade sanctions against China for currency manipulation, and Japan has just intervened in its own currency this week:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-15/japan-intervenes-for-first-time-since-2004-as-yen-surge-threatens-recovery.html
This intervention was apparently unilateral, meaning it will not be supported by the U.S. and Europe (as we predicted in our last article). Where is this headed? I have no doubt we will see trade wars and currency wars between the West and Asia relatively soon:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68D12320100914
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/currency-wars-set-to-break-out/story-e6frg9qo-1225919825846The U.S. Government may put on a happy face initially for Japan, and they may not immediately go after China, but it will happen eventually, especially as the U.S. economy continues to degrade. The government will have to offer a scapegoat, and China is likely to be it, along with Japan if they continue intervention. This will result in a Treasury bond dump by China, which they have been blatantly preparing for the past three years. The dollar will collapse, guaranteed.
How can you make a difference in such a massive problem? Place your savings in commodities like gold and silver.
If we are to end the tyranny of fiat, we have to have an alternative currency. Right now, precious metals are the best option. Gold has recently sprinted past previous records and is now holding around $1270 an ounce. This is just the beginning. I would not be surprised to see gold at around $1350 to $1400 by this winter. As the dollar continues to degrade, and as inflation becomes a reality, the best way to protect your savings will be through PM’s.
Skeptics will argue that gold is inherently “valueless”. I always respond by asking them how much more “value” they think their paper dollars have. Everyone wants to attack gold, but conversely, no one wants to actually compare the benefits of gold to fiat. I also usually refer people who parrot MSM talking points on gold to the early writings of Alan Greenspan, before he was sucked into the maniacal carnival death cult otherwise known as the Federal Reserve:
http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html
I have heard the argument that because we are facing a deflationary collapse, gold is a bad investment. First off, we are NOT in a traditional deflationary collapse. If you want to see one, go to Japan, where prices are actually deflating. Here in the U.S. prices on goods and commodities are rising, in some cases 25% or more over the past year:
http://www.crbtrader.com/crbindex/data.asp
Some who see rising prices claim that this is still deflation, and that prices are rising due to manipulation. I think it much more likely, as has been proven with gold and silver, that prices are being manipulated DOWN in most cases, not up. In fact, many retailers will absorb wholesale price increases on goods just to keep shelf prices stable in the hopes of maintaining their customer base. And yet, prices have still increased despite this manipulation since the crisis began. This is inflation. Analysts need to stop clinging to the typical idea of deflation and inflation and look at the situation as it is. While some elements of the economy are deflating, like housing, this does not mean that housing is any longer a good indicator of deflation in the rest of the economy. What we are seeing are elements of both inflation and deflation at the same time (and no, they don’t cancel each other out). Gold has held its own and will hold its own exactly because currencies around the world are being devalued and even greater inflation is a very real possibility.
Eventually, once the dollar and the global bankers are out of the picture, a gold backed currency could be implemented much like the currency we used rather successfully up until 1913 when the Federal Reserve was established and we slowly lost control over our money.
Buying gold and silver though is only a start…
Start An Alternative Economy: Individuals can put this into action by building barter and trade networks in their communities. Skills, labor, and goods can be traded by neighbors without government influence or interference in transactions. This can also be expanded to the web, and some people with ingenuity have done just that, including the ‘We Trade Network’, which you can view here (Special thanks to Catherine Austin Fitts for posting this to her website, Solari.com):
http://www.wetradenetwork.com/what.php
The barter network keeps wealth in communities and out of the corporate apparatus. It also allows us to be less affected by any economic collapse that does occur in the globalist system, because we will have already constructed our own system outside of its sphere of influence. Barter and trade alone are not enough though, and to be truly effective as an alternative community, we need industry.
Start A Micro-Industry: There are many savvy business people in the Liberty Movement; those that could establish a gold and silver based currency network, and those that have the means to create not titanic corporations, but at least micro-industries within their own communities. This starts with a standardization of payment.
If Liberty Movement business leaders began accepting gold and silver as payment for goods and services instead of requiring customers to exchange their PM’s for dollars before hand, this would go a long way towards building an alternative economy. If Liberty Movement Business leaders then started giving their employees the option of being paid in gold and silver instead of dollars, it would make an even bigger impression. Given the fact that the Liberty Movement is growing exponentially every year, and the fact that the dollar is likely to degrade heavily soon, this is also good business sense. It would only take a few influential men to initiate this process.
Those who wish to start a business in their communities and have sufficient space can organize local garden trade, solar power grids, furniture making, tool making, even small electronics outfits or telephone companies. The point is to separate oneself from the diseased system and start a healthy one, one community at a time. This is not difficult. It only requires that people stop thinking about taking action, and actually take action.Support Constitutional Candidates: Vote for true Constitutionalists and proponents of limited government. Run for office yourself! Even if the deck is stacked against us in this regard, we should still try. Promote 10th Amendment rights of states, and your local sheriff (as long as he’s a good guy). Anything non-Federal should be pushed to the forefront of discussion. This is, in a way, another form on non-participation, because we are creating a political dynamic outside the system that is still influential on the system. Again, if the establishment will not provide honest candidates, or honest parties, we must provide our own.
Become Self Reliant: Supporting liberty based candidates is certainly worth doing, but it is not nearly as important as making yourself independent. You do not need large organizations with designated leaders and extensive funding to help you find meaning, or to further the cause of truth. That is something that can and should be pursued first and foremost by you alone. Organization comes later. It grows upon the works and deeds of individuals invested in a common idea. Freedom is a powerful common idea.
Something as unassuming as a personal garden can lead to a strong sense of self reliance, and there is no rule that says you have to start big. You just have to start somewhere.
Revolution?
The beauty of Non-Participation is that it is a revolutionary act that only makes us less threatening in the eyes of the uninformed, which is not what the establishment wants. I have already seen several MSM articles describing Tea Party candidates as “insurgents” (terrorists):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704190704575490263482050010.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/14/september-14-primary-elec_n_715694.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-14/tea-party-backed-insurgent-pushes-for-upset-in-delaware-primary.html
This kind of propaganda is a natural outgrowth of the system’s inability to cope with the idea that the people are no longer reliant upon it. By separating ourselves from the system, we diminish it, make it weak. In the case of the MSM, the alternative media has in some ways forced the system to let more truth filter down to the public just to keep people watching their garbage. We are gradually forcing them to conform to the truth. Unfortunately, I suspect this will not be the case in other fields.
Another option open to the establishment is the use of violence. This will be the likely reaction to the Liberty Movement’s efforts in politics and economy. Yet again, we benefit. Through non-participation, we force the elites to attack us, or to implement laws so outrageous as to be interpreted as an attack on the public. The people are already being victimized by the establishment, but if we as a movement or as individuals were to turn towards violence as an initial solution, we would be seen as the “bad guys”. This would only help the elites. We also do not want a French or Communist style revolution with angry mobs and guillotines that results in greater tyranny. What we want is an American Revolution. The Founding Fathers didn’t cross the ocean to go and lynch mob the British, they forced the British to make a choice; to leave the American independent states alone, or to come after them. By declaring themselves separate and thus no longer reliant on the British elites, American revolutionaries became defenders, not aggressors or terrorists.
By creating an economic alternative to the current system, we force the elites to make a choice. We become the defenders, and the establishment is revealed as the aggressor it really is. If we are attacked, then any violence we do reciprocate would be in self-defense, which is not only an understandable survival instinct but also a perfectly honorable response. This is the way to expand public support for liberty based concepts. This is the way to bring down despots.
In the end, it is up to you. Will you walk away from this article and continue waiting for the Liberty Movement to move you, or will you take action and progress the movement yourself? Will you make those first steps towards ending your reliance on a system that is designed to hurt you and your family, or will you sit still and wait for it to do so? Before you can force the elites to make their choice, you must make your own. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. What you don’t want, is for a stranger to one day make the choice for you…
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