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Tuesday, 30 September, 2008

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE BAILOUT

The big emergency bailout bill failed to pass Congress yesterday! The stock market immediately answered with a 777 point drop in the DOW. The biggest drop since 1987, and the biggest single day point drop in history.

That's how irrationally sensitive, and divorced from real reality, the "markets" are. Alarmists inform us that for the lack of a measly $700 billion dollar bailout, the market dropped a trillion dollars from our economy. But if the value was actually there in the first place, there should be little to worry about. If the value is actually there, it will bounce back. But since that isn't the case, and since it is more dependent on public confidence than reality, we have a lot to worry about – and the big bailout isn't about to fix it on anything but a very limited, temporary, basis.

The amazing thing is that this bailout is supposedly the biggest deal to come before Congress in generations. Getting the bailout passed was so critical that Congress worked on it through the weekend. It had to be passed yesterday, Monday the 29th!

Why did it have to be passed on Monday the 29th? Because Tuesday is Rosh Hashanah! That means Congress' next opportunity for saving the global economy comes on Wednesday and Thursday, the 1st and 2nd of October – giving the stock market an additional day to finish crashing if it is so inclined. Wall Street doesn't shut down for the Jewish New Year.

This circumstance is most peculiar. There's something seriously wrong. As one Jewish commentator on Larry King Live, Ben Stein, observed last night, "This country doesn't have a state religion – and, if it did, it certainly wouldn't be Judaism."

Is there any doubt that Congress would sacrifice Christmas – a legal federal holiday – if such an emergency was confronting them? But the American Congress won't slight the Jewish holidays in order to save the economy! This speaks loads to the reverence in which our Gentile politicians hold Israel and the Chosen People. They apparently trump the American people.

Actually, the break may have a very positive effect. A little more reason may have time to interject itself – and maybe prevail – if the bottom doesn't fall out of Wall Street tomorrow. No guarantees there, of course.

John Q. Pridger

SARAH PALIN GETTING THE TREATMENT

The Democrats and the media are busily doing their "post celebratory frenzy" number on Sarah Palin and the McCain ticket. The media's honeymoon with Sarah is over, and they're now playing hard ball. John McCain might have known.

All Pridger has to say is "Stay in there Sarah! Don't let them get you down! Be careful with those off the cuff jokes – about 'bringing in whole bunches,' Russia being next door, and the UN being infested with foreigners, etc. The Democrats and media don't have a real sense of humor when it comes to presidential politics. They'll take them seriously and try to stab you with them. Multiple stabs – on every count.

Sarah may not be perfect, but Pridger would much rather see the "girl next door" become vice president than the Wicked Witch of the East or a veteran warlock (not that Hillary or Joe Biden would fall into those categories, of course).

John Q. Pridger

Sunday, 28 September, 2008

WHAT IS MONEY?

As familiar as money is to all of us, defining what money is, or should be, is one of the most difficult things to do in a way that can be broadly understood. The confusion is, of course, is intentional. The so-called "money power" certainly doesn't want the subject to be understood by the general public – much less, our legislators.

One of the problems is that there isn't a "simple definition" of money, because money is different things to different people. For example, "hard money" men insist that only gold and silver can serve as money, and that paper is only good when it convertible to a certain measure of either gold or silver. Others insist that paper and tokens will not only serve, but are the only rational way to provide a stable and honest circulating currency.

So, there are essentially two kinds of money: (1) Money that is valuable (i.e., gold, silver, or a hand of tobacco, etc.), and (2) Money that represents value, or exchange value (paper and token money). Both kinds of money may be given "legal tender status" by fiat of government, but only "hard money" (specie), such as gold and silver coin "possess" value in its own right.

During most our national history (and most world history), we have officially favored hard money, and paper "certificates" that were tied to gold and silver – essentially gold and silver "warehouse receipts." This is because everybody "trusts" gold and silver, and few trust "paper" that cannot be easily redeemed in gold or silver at fixed face value.

But there has seldom been enough gold or silver available to satisfy exchange requirements – certainly not in a modern industrialized economy. So, in order fool the public into thinking paper was as good as gold, the fractional reserve banking system was devised (long before the United States came into existence). This system permitted bankers to keep only a fraction of the gold and silver in their vaults in comparison with the "cash money" they could loan into circulation and collect interest on.

For example, if the fractional reserve requirement was 10%, that meant that with ten dollars worth of gold stashed in its vault, a bank was permitted to loan out ninety additional dollars – each of which was supposedly "good as gold." This, of course, was a form of fraud, but it worked as long as people were satisfied to hold paper and did not try to turn it all in to exchange for gold.

It worked so well that banks operated that way during the entire time that we were on the gold standard. The people were successfully conned into believing the bank paper was as good as gold, even though there was ten times more paper in circulation than real gold backing it. So the gold standard, when we had it, was 90% fictitious. But this was standard procedure. (90% may not be the actual figure, but is used for illustrative purposes only).

The fractional reserve system permitted a lot more monetary liquidity, in the form of gold backed currency or credit, than the reserve gold supply would otherwise have permitted. It worked, and was quite a bonanza to both the business and banking communities.

But, if most of the money was fictitious under the gold standard, why did the system work so well? It worked because the spending public had confidence in the paper that they used for money – a paper dollar purchased a dollar's worth of goods and services, and that's all the public really cares about.

So, why not just drop the gold fiction and use paper? Without getting into the complexities of history, that's exactly what we've done. We now use strictly paper and token coin – but it is administered by bankers with even more fraud at the core of the system than the gold standard fiction.

When gold was finally dropped from the monetary equation, the bankers had already long been in total control of the monetary system, and in total control of the issuance of currency. The backing for the money was no longer gold, but government debt – government's promise to pay.

The system worked admirably well. Trouble is, it was a Ponzi scheme designed to skin the public, and destined to leave the public holding the bag when the game played out and the house of cards collapsed. Under our Federal Reserve monetary policy, economic growth became synonymous with the expansion of public debt. That's where we are today with almost a $10 trillion public debt and the financial crisis presently at hand.

It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. You simply can't bail out a Ponzi scheme and come out winners.

The only real answer would be "honest money" – even if it is purely fiat government "ticket" money. Even paper money can be honest, if it is issued and administered honestly.

The government has as much authority to issue and spend honest paper money directly into circulation as it has to issue the Treasury bills, bonds, and notes it "sells" to financial interests, investors, and foreign central bankers.

The machinery for issuing and spending honest money into circulation has long been a component of our monetary system. It's simply no longer used. This, of course, goes back to the Civil War and the "greenback" laws, which remain on the books to this day, though issue of greenbacks was formally abandoned in about 1969. (After the Civil War, due to banker hostility, greenbacks were only allowed to remain an insignificant portion of our "monetary mix." The bankers didn't like them because they couldn't control them and didn't get from them what they considered "their rightful cut" of the monetary pie.)

Greenbacks, officially known as United States Notes, are simply Treasury notes issued in small denominations to be used as circulating currency. They looked like today's common Federal Reserve Notes, after which they were patterned in order to fool the public into thinking FRNs are the same thing as greenbacks.

The government could resume issuing U.S. Notes with which to save the economy (as Lincoln did to save the nation during the Civil War), and forego the "necessity" of burdening the public with $700 billion an additional debt in the currently proposed bailout.

This solution is far too simple for our politician to see.

WHY "THEY" CAN'T SEE IT

Paper money has been successfully used for internal exchanged many times throughout history. It's being used now, but with such a long financial tail on it that it's real purpose and utility are totally negated and obscured. Its purpose and utility is to serve as a convenient exchange medium – as simple in concept as a theater ticket which is sufficient to gain entrance to the theater.

That's all a dollar should be seen as – a universally recognized ticket to a dollar's worth of goods or services.

Let's dispose of gold and silver once and for all as a necessary component of our national currency. Gold and silver coin, of course, represent real storable value, and have their place in savings and international commerce. But the dollar bill should be our circulating currency of the realm, and nothing more or less. It should not have a fixed relationship to gold or silver, because those are valuable commodities that bear no relation to the necessities of life, such as food and shelter, or an hour's worth of labor.

It would make no sense to have the richest, most productive, agricultural and industrial economy imaginable, but say it could not function without gold or silver coins to exchange for goods and services. That would be ludicrous. So, what would such an economy use for money? Government issued paper certificates, of course – bottomed on the actual goods, services, labor, available in the marketplace.

When our nation was founded, the founders did not consider it necessary for the government to "manufacture" money. At that time foreign gold and silver coin was the only money in circulation, and it was determined that gold and silver would be adopted as the nation's official money.

Government didn't "make money" and certainly couldn't manufacture gold or silver. The first coin adopted as the American monetary unit was the Spanish silver dollar then being minted in great abundance in Mexico and in use as the predominant trade dollar at the time. When our government began minting its own coins, all it could to was mint foreign coin or bullion that came to it through the various few forms of taxation the Constitution made possible – mostly from tariffs and duties on international trade.

Since government was small, taxation was deemed an adequate source of government revenue. The primary source was from import tariffs on foreign trade. Since the young nation was quite productive, agricultural exports earned most of the nation's revenue, when the imports which they were traded for came in and were taxed. The taxes were collected in gold and silver coin.

Later, when domestic sources of gold and silver came on line, free mintage of those metals was offered. That is, anybody with gold and silver could bring it into the mint and have it converted into coins. This was a necessary government service to increase the volume of coin in circulation. But the coins belonged to the people that brought the metal in, not the government. So, the government didn't make money. It had to tax people or trade in order to get it.

While a lot of gold and silver coin circulated as currency, a lot of it was also deposited in banks for safe keeping. Banks would issue receipts for the coin, and in time these receipts were traded to satisfy debts. And they evolved into a de facto paper currency which circulated alongside gold and silver coin. Thus paper currency – "bank notes" – came to circulate in great volumes as the nation grew and developed commercially.

Quite often, for one reason or another (generally war), government found it needed more money than it was able to collect by means of taxation. So it had to borrow money from bankers (foreign or domestic). To do this, the Treasury issued a promissory note – a Treasury Note or bond – founded on the "full faith and credit of the nation." The bank would loan money to the government (in gold or silver coin), and the Treasury note or bond would promise to repay the loan by a certain time, plus interest, in gold or silver.

It became obvious to interested perceptive observers, that if bank notes could circulate as currency (money), and if banks were willing to accept Treasury notes as security for loans, as if they had value in an of themselves, then government could simply circulate Treasury Notes as money. This would be a great benefit to the public, as such currency could be issued and circulated without the necessity of paying interest to the banks. If bank notes could serve as money, there was no reason that Treasury Notes could do the same thing at no significant public cost.

This was done during the Civil War, and the Lincoln greenback became our very first national paper currency, and it served its purpose well.

There were two major obstacles to the idea of government Treasury Notes as money. First, and most importantly, the banking powers were vehemently against them. And the banking powers not only had the money to loan (credit to extend), but the ability to bribe politicians and public servants to "see things their way."

Secondly, the general public itself had long been conditioned to think in terms of gold and silver coin as money – a condition and belief the bankers were very active in promoting. Yet the public initially eagerly accepted the greenback. Greenbacks were both convenient and backed by their government (which most of them still trusted in those days). But the idea of national "legal tender" was systematically sabotaged by the bankers who were in a position to make government paper a second class monetary instrument – because their money supposedly represented gold.

Though the greenback survived after the Civil War, the issue of greenbacks was strictly limited (finally, in 1878, to a total of $322 million). In 1878 Congress bolstered the greenback's image by officially backing it by gold in the Treasury, finally making the greenback as "good as gold." But National Bank Notes, and later gold and silver certificates, made up the bulk of our circulating paper currency. And, of course, gold and silver coin also circulated.

But what the bankers wanted was the government's stamp of approval on their own bank notes – notes that would represent indebtedness too them, and perpetual profit, and still be viewed as favorably as greenbacks by the people.

After the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, Federal Reserve Notes – a new kind of bank notes (made to look like greenbacks [as did gold and silver certificates]), came into increased use. These Bank Notes, now our only "legal tender" currency still being issued, were also backed by gold, and thus (like the greenback), as good as gold. But Federal Reserve Notes are a very different creature from the greenback.

Domestically we went off the gold standard in 1933, though we officially clung to the gold standard, allowing foreigners to convert their dollar into gold, until 1971. In that year the international gold standard was finally abandoned.

By 1969 our "good as gold" greenback (our own national money), had already been withdrawn and was no longer being issued or circulated. Gold and silver certificates were history by then also. So we were reduced to fiat bank notes as our only circulating currency. All real "national currency" was gone, replaced by banker notes with an official government seal on them, making them the "national currency."

So now we enjoy the worst of all worlds from a monetary standpoint. Federal Reserve banker money is an infinitely inflatable currency, limited in issue only by Congressional ability to raise the national debt ceiling. There's not real value in them. They are credit and debt instruments. Yet Treasury bonds, bills, and notes are used to secure those debt obligations, binding the American people to PAY.

With our current financial crisis at hand, it's time to resurrect the good old greenback dollar and do away with bank money which is both root and core of what is being called our "casino economy" and a literal "Ponzi scheme" where the super rich win and We the People always end up holding the bag.

John Q. Pridger

HOW MOST OF US SEE MONEY

Most of us know money in the simplest sense and the simplest terms. We earn or otherwise come by a dollar bill, or four quarters, and can take it anywhere and exchange it for a "dollar's worth" of goods and services. And that's all that matters to most of us. And guess what? That should be enough! That's the only real function that money should serve.

That's what money does for us. It serves as a "ticket" – a simple ticket, or tickets and tokens – that we can exchange for goods and services. What makes those "tickets" money? Nothing more than the sovereign's stamp, and the pledge that "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private." It makes no real difference what it's made of.

In the case of the United States, the "sovereign" (the government), is supposed to be "We the People" – and Congress acts as our representative body.

The government, because of its sovereign authority, has the unique ability to create and issue money, based solely on its own assumed creditworthiness – "the full faith and credit of the nation." This is one of the most important functions of any government.

Of course, our government does this. But it does it in a most peculiar way. It's tickets are called Treasury bills (notes, or bonds). These "Treasuries" are the source of our money and backing for our national credit. But the government doesn't spend these monetary instruments into circulation, as it should, and once did. It uses them as collateral for loans in order to obtain Federal Reserve money to spend. And the Federal Reserve issues the tickets we use for our circulating currency.

Where it should just issue and spend United States (Treasury) Notes directly into circulation, it borrows against them, thereby obtaining the "cash" to spend. But it also still owes the money, plus interest on the loan!

The only cash we see today is in the form of Federal Reserve Notes, each of which is a little indebtedness note. It serves us as currency, but FRNs are not "the People's money" – it is banker money. Debt money.

To make matters much worse, we have a fractional reserve banking system, which allows banks to create additional money through loans to businesses or individuals, based o a small fraction of actual money held in the vaults or on the books. But we won't get into that here.

United States Notes are what were called "greenbacks." They were free, and "debt free," tickets that once served as at least a portion of our spending cash.

Federal Reserve Notes are incorrectly called "greenbacks" because they look almost identical to greenbacks, and serve (now), as the overwhelming bulk of our spending cash. But they are not "ours," and thus are certainly not free. They are banker notes, and bankers make money on them.

Gold and silver are totally outside of the monetary equation at the moment. But we must mention them because there are many who swear than money can only be gold or silver, and this is cause for much public confusion about money.

Gold and silver are valuable metallic commodities. They have served as money, and in times past have served very well in that role when minted into coin and circulated as currency. They still have a role to play, but that role is not as an everyday circulating currency.

Precious metal currency, in coin form, should circulated freely in the economy, but not as the national currency. Gold and silver serve as "real money" regardless of the national currency and type of monetary system in place. But the national paper and token coins should not be tied to gold or silver – simply because it is impossible to have a currency that maintains a stable purchasing power in the everyday marketplace if it is tied to precious metals.

Precious metals occupy a different world, because they are both rare and subject to their own supply and demand forces. Gold and silver coin should be the "money" one saves by burying in the back yard or in a banker's vault. They should not be denominated in dollars or any other national currency measure, but in internationally recognized weights.

John Q. Pridger

Friday, 26 September, 2008

DON'T BAIL 'EM OR BUY 'EM OUT – NATIONALIZE THEM!

The public is about to be skinned to the tune of $700 billion or much more!

The public does not want to be skinned. This should be treated as the national emergency that it is. It isn't time to buy anything or bail the wrong doers out. It's time for the president to act decisively and invoke his war powers prerogatives and nationalize the failing financial Ponzi schemers one and all.

So what if we've been preaching "privatization" to the whole world for for over a generation – we seldom practice what we preach any more anyway. Nationalize the entire financial sector, sort it out, correct the balance sheets, erase the phantom assets and values, and write in the real values of the remaining assets. The hand the whole mess back to the owners and stockholders with corrected books, reflecting harsh reality.

If the real assets are only a tenth of the book value, that's what the stock values should reflect. If this means bringing Wall Street stock prices down to reality, that's where it should have been in the first place. If a 3,000 DOW represents reality and 11,000 is 85% hot air, then hot air should be allowed its freedom.

Revalue all of the real estate involved to realistic market values so most homeowners will be able to resume paying on their mortgages. $30,000.00 houses shouldn't have been selling for $300,000.00 anyway – even in southern California.

If ten trillion dollars suddenly evaporate and cease to exist – the remaining money in circulation will be worth at least ten trillion dollars more in purchasing power.

As part of the emergency package, would be wage and price controls. The power of the government to set wage and price standards would be only temporary – to get them back into line with real values.

The most important thing to nationalize would be the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Reserve banks so Congress can get a handle on the nation's banks of credit issue and reclaim the business of money issue to the people where it rightfully belongs.

John Q. Pridger

SOMETHING REAL BEING DONE

Steven Zarlenga, Directory of the American M onetary Institute, and author of The Lost Science of Money, has been planning rational monetary reform for several years. This just might be the crisis needed to wake up the right people. Here's what he has to say about the present crisis and the proposed bailout:

“A Trillion $ Here, A Trillion $ There - pretty soon …”

Yes we are talking about “real money!” Or are we?

As the Administration so adept at “shock and awe” takes aim at the American Congress, rushing them to sign on to an ill defined proposal fostering monetary and economic error, to ostensibly resolve a problem they have allowed to fester for years.

Not again folks - Congress job is to get this one right the first time.

Getting it right means requiring several conditions to protect the American people from the gang that’s been financially raping the nation; that gave us the unnecessary Iraqi war. It means facing the facts on where the banking crisis is and how it got there. It means examining the monetary and economic reforms of the Federal Reserve System that will assure that such thievery or foolishness won’t happen again; and taking back from those who improperly benefited from the tragedy and prosecuting them.

Finally it means giving all Americans a financial stake through ownership, of a share of the system that they are being asked to bail out.

READ MORE at the American Monetary Institute web site

http://www.monetary.org/700billionscam.html

Going on right now! The AMI 2008 Monetary Reform Conference At Roosevelt University in Chicago, Sept. 25–28, 2008. Read about what's going on: http://www.monetary.org/2008conference.html

READ THE NEED FOR MONETARY REFORM

http://www.monetary.org/need_for_monetary_reform.html

WHO SAW THE HOUSING MARKET CRASH COMING?

Ron Paul, for one – a man who, as a Republican presidential candidate, might have been in line to actually guide the nation toward a sane economic policy. McCain and Obama are both out of their depth with regard to major economic issues.

In July of 2002 Congressman Paul introduced the "Free Housing Market Enhancement Act" to avert the catastrophe that has come down on our heads six year further down the line. (See: http://ronpaulblog.com/)

Congressman Ron Paul
U.S. House of Representatives
July 16, 2002

Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act. This legislation restores a free market in housing by repealing special privileges for housing-related government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). These entities are the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie), and the National Home Loan Bank Board (HLBB). According to the Congressional Budget Office, the housing-related GSEs received $13.6 billion worth of indirect federal subsidies in fiscal year 2000 alone.

One of the major government privileges granted these GSEs is a line of credit to the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. This explicit promise by the Treasury to bail out these GSEs in times of economic difficulty helps them attract investors who are willing to settle for lower yields than they would demand in the absence of the subsidy. Thus, the line of credit distorts the allocation of capital. More importantly, the line of credit is a promise on behalf of the government to engage in a massive unconstitutional and immoral income transfer from working Americans to holders of GSE debt.

The Free Housing Market Enhancement Act also repeals the explicit grant of legal authority given to the Federal Reserve to purchase the debt of housing-related GSEs. GSEs are the only institutions besides the United States Treasury granted explicit statutory authority to monetize their debt through the Federal Reserve. This provision gives the GSEs a source of liquidity unavailable to their competitors.

Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges of Fannie, Freddie, and HLBB have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.

However, despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policies of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.

Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing GSE debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary but painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts.

No less an authority than Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has expressed concern that government subsidies provided to the GSEs make investors underestimate the risk of investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. Speaker, it is time for Congress to act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors misled by foolish government interference in the market. I therefore hope my colleagues will stand up for American taxpayers and investors by cosponsoring the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act.

(From: http://ronpaulblog.com/)

Dr. Paul's insight was far ahead of events, and had the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act passed, much economic pain would undoubtedly have been avoided. When the government distorts the markets, the markets become increasingly unbalanced, and the inevitable eventually occurs, as it has in the case of the housing mortgage and general financial crisis.

A WORD ON GOVERNMENT SPONSORED ENTERPRISE (GSE)

In a free market economy, under a limited constitutional government such as ours, the very idea of GSE would seem anathema. However there is a place for GSE in a free market economy.

Certain necessary or desirable government services come to mind. The United States Post Office comes to mind. The Armed Services (the War Department), are another. The United States Public Health Service, which began as the Marine Hospital Service, is another. These services date from the earliest years of the Republic.

Nobody questions that national defense is a federal matter under our constitution. Few question that the Postal Service, and construction of post roads (a Federal Highway Department), were desirable departments of the federal government.

The line must be drawn somewhere, however. Obviously we have never adopted socialism as our national model. Free enterprise has worked remarkably well, though the federal government obviously constructively contributed to the development of the nation and its infrastructure from the very beginning.

Perhaps our first major errors occurred when it came to the manner in which the railroad land grants were handled. On one level, it worked perfectly and a wonderful railroad infrastructure was constructed. On another, it opened the doors for a century and more of abuse by effectively federally empowered capitalist enterprise. And corruption grew as huge railroad empires evolved, as great public purpose was transformed to private profit for a growing cadre of privileged capitalists. The public land grants became the permanent property of private individuals and huge business combines.

The Civil War was of particular significance. Aside from the good that came in ending the institution of chattel slavery, the Republic was essentially changed from a Union of several republics to a Federal State with vastly increased powers. And Federal power has been increasing ever since, co-opting, and increasingly usurping, the powers and rightful prerogatives of the States.

This centralization of power has resulted in a federal state which seeks to impose a degree of uniformity throughout the nation that can only be accomplished by increased federal oversight and control of more and more of the nation's business and social infrastructure.

In time, government sponsored enterprises became more of a rule than exception in certain areas. Because we still claim to champion free enterprise and spurn the idea of socialism, GSEs are often merely indirectly subsidized, "guaranteed," or insured by the Treasury so that a facade of free enterprise can be maintained. Often, the guarantees are merely implied – and the subsidies and guarantees are in the form of easy access to federal credit.

This has been the case with Fannie Mea and Freddie Mac. And the unintended national (and even global), economic consequences have finally become obvious.

If we are going to have socialized industries, enterprises, and services (and there is no reason why we shouldn't, they should be totally above board and transparent, as in the case of the partially self-funding businesses like the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak.

If the service is worthwhile, and private enterprise will not provide it due to present market conditions, at least the public should be able see what they are paying for and why – and there should be o avenue to cumulative surprises should the enterprises not be properly managed. Congressional and public oversight should always remain front and center in any GSE.

Needless to say, $700 billion surprises should not even be within the realm of possibility. Even now we should "just say NO!" to the bailout. Our criminally irresponsible leadership in Washington and financial wheelers and dealer have effectively set us up for this fall. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

Out and out nationalization of the guilty firms – without compensation – rather than massive bailouts and purchases, is the only way to avoid huge payout for the culprits, provide justice for the taxpayers, and provide a soft landing for the economy.

This, after all, is a national emergency. Hapless investors and legitimate stakeholders, such as home owners, could be compensated or "bailed out" after nationalization for a fraction of the proposed $700 billion. Then the various financial entities nationalized should be cleaned up and reorganized on a solid footing before being returned to the original stockholders – with the value of the stock reduced to the real market value of surviving assets.

And, since it is a national emergency, it would also be a great time to nationalize the nation's monetary authority and reintroduce the idea of honest money. Honest money tends to keep both people and business honest.

This, of course, would require real leadership. Thus, it is unlikely to happen.

John Q. Pridger

Wednesday, 24 September, 2008

AHMADINEJAD – VOICE OF REASON?

Last night Iranian president, Mohmoud Ahmadinejad, appeared on Larry King Live. Much to his credit, Mr. King conducted a very civil interview, asking many very pertinent questions, and allowing the Iranian president to answer contentious questions at length without interruption.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, in spite of his name and nation, came across as a voice of moderation and reason, giving honest answers (sometimes very politically incorrect answers), to pointed questions.

The irony (and embarrassment to some), was that Ahmadinejad – a man who, along with his nation, is routinely demonized as a "new Hitler" – comes across as an honest and reasonable man.

Christian-Zionists continue calling Ahamadinejad a "psychotic individual," a "tyrant," and an anti-Semite. They, in what can only be described as a very unchristian way, are beating the drums of hatred against Iran and Ahmadinejad, with a special focus on Ahmadinejad's alleged "anti-Semitism."

Ahmadinejad's so-called anti-Semitism is his unshakable belief that what we call the nation of Israel is an illegal occupation of Palestine by Zionist interlopers. His belief (which is a belief shared by many), is based on not only the facts, but over sixty years Israeli/Zionist injustices against the Palestinian people. He correctly points out that the Palestinian people had no major problems until their land was taken over by alien Zionists – something that was accomplished with the assistance of colonial-era European powers, with the blessing and support of the United States.

His great sin is in advocating that peace might come to Palestine through self-determination of the Palestinian people (which would presumably include the Jewish people of Palestine), through democratic processes.

No supporter of Israel likes to hear that. They prefer to hear that Israel is already the one and only beacon of freedom, liberty, and western democracy, in the Middle East. Because the Jews are our friends, we look upon Israel as a beleaguered and heroic nation surrounded by radical and jealous enemies – totally overlooking and ignoring the history of how that most peculiar of nations came about.

Israel is the most peculiar of nations because the Zionists who founded it and rule it are secularists with no religion faith. They have an abiding faith in, and commitment to only one thing – Jewishness. In spite of their lack of religious faith, the Zionist claim to the "Promised Land" is strictly biblical – a very peculiar claim for agnostics and atheists. Of course, religious Jews were among their supporters, and Jews, both religious and non-religious had a long-held rallying cry of, "Tomorrow Jerusalem!"

Israel is the first and only "secular state" which was set up exclusively for a religious identity group. Only Jews are welcome as immigrants – others need not apply. Justification for it's existence is faith-based, and their identity is a religious one. Zionism and the nation of Israel are religion based. Israel is a "Jewish State," and "Jewish" is a religious identity.

The secular Jew, in spite of a lack of religious faith, nonetheless seems to know the Jewish People are "God's gift to mankind." It is so self-evident that, in all modesty, they never have to mention it. And, whether we are believers or not, who are we Gentiles to question it?

"Christian Zionists" support Israel on religious grounds, believing the establishment of the State of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And, most ironically of all, many "religious" Jews were, and many remain, opposed "political Zionism" and the establishment of the State of Israel – believing their return to Zion would come about in due time through non political means, accordance to God's plan.

On the continuing Holocaust controversy, Ahmadinejad merely iterates that he isn't convinced of the declared scope of the tragedy – and is thus condemned as a "Holocaust denier." But, he points out, even if the Holocaust dogma is 100% true, and no fewer than six million Jews were wantonly exterminated by the Nazis, the crime was committed by Europeans rather than the Palestinian Arabs. He asks why the Palestinians should be paying the penalty?

This morning Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations General Assembly. Again we see another great irony – the specter of a president of "Axis of Evil" Iran lecturing, and even sermonizing, the world, with particular barbs directed toward the United States and certain other Western allies – asking for a halt to military occupations, interventions, and continuing needless death and destruction. In short he finds himself in the position to lecture us on the very principles we have traditionally lectured others on, using the podium of the United Nations General Assembly as his soap box.

The United Nations was America's gift to the world – and the tail by which the United State intended to wag it. But, in spite of all of our good works, others are now co-opting the moral high ground, lecturing us on liberty and the doctrines of equality, freedom, and national self-determination – even on such things as compassion, love, friendship, forgiveness, and the necessity of following God's path toward redemption.

Pridger understands he received more applause from the Assembly than boos and cat calls in the assembly of delegates. So much for the carefully crafted plans of mice and men. Here we stand, with our economic cookies crumbling around our ears, still insisting that we occupy the moral high ground – and that if Ahmadinejad doesn't believe it, we have the military might, bombs, and weapons of mass destruction, to prove it in no uncertain terms.

John Q. Pridger

THE THREAT OF RETURNING TO ISOLATION

For many decades we've been swearing never to return to the isolationism that brought us national greatness. We were beyond that – we've grown up and now it is time to show the world just what we could do. We felt the world just could not handle it if we withdrew back into and "isolationist shell." The world now needs our constant leadership, supervision, and intervention. They need our money – it replaced gold as the world's reserve currency.

Well, it was nice of us to rebuild Japan and Europe after winning the Second World War, but now we've gone too far. After all the rebuilding, we thought we owned it all – thus, returning to isolationism was beyond consideration.

But now that we're increasingly trying to command the world, something totally unscripted is taking place. Our chickens – the ones we were too arrogant to acknowledge – are coming home to roost. Not in the form of terrorist attacks this time, but in the form of the inevitable economic collapse.

Ponzi schemes always leave somebody holding the bag. We'll have to wait to see who holds the last bag. In the mean time, much of the world seems ready to divest itself of our way of doing business. We may be isolated – not out of self-interest and a desire to mind our own business – but because we have become an international military and economic pariah. We may be told to take our Treasuries and sham Federal Reserve dollars and go home – and stay home.

If we end up holding the bag, as we deserve, it could be a great opportunity. We may be forced to declare independence again, re-industrialize, and rebuild a real economy. We may eve be forced to re-invent a national currency so we can have a free market economy here at home, based on national self-reliance, production, and constructive self-interest.

But fear not! Congress will probably mess up and miss a great opportunity to really start cleaning up our act. Rather than correcting the systemic problems, they will do their best to patch up the failing system – by throwing an impressively large amount of money at it – and make it work a little longer.

Right now we're in a little confusion as to who is really in charge of rescuing the economy. Is it the Treasury Secretary, who is a temporary public servant, but life long professional big banker – or is it the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who represents the bankers' predominate bank?

Nobody is mentioning monetary reform, which would have to be initiated by Congress and accomplished by the Treasury Department. So far we see the Treasury Secretary coming front and center to advocate a bailout package that amounts to giving him dictatorial powers as sort of a national bailout Czar, locking both Congress and the courts out of any constitutional oversight roles.

This is not the time to pump more credit dollars into a failing system that has been misallocating credit. It write-down time on a lot of bogus and fraudulent debt. It's "correction time" on inflated real estate prices. And yes, it's even debt forgiveness time in some cases. It's time to allow a few trillion debt dollars to simply evaporate from the economy – with the guilty parties taking their rightful hits.

It's not time for the Treasury to be given a blank $700 billion check with which to issue treasury bills that will be used to borrow more Federal Reserve credit dollars. It's a great time for Congress to see the light, and direct the Treasury to start spending Treasury Notes (Greenbacks), into circulation so that no additional debt will be piled upon the already un-payable debts we already have – and begin reclaiming the monetary sovereignty that rightly belongs to the people.

If this is considered taboo because it is inflationary, just think of how inflationary issuing $700 billion debt dollars into circulation would be!

$700 billion in Greenback money can satisfy $700 billion in government obligations, for the mere cost of printing up the money, or authorizing credit entries into electronic balance sheets.

$700 billion in Federal Reserve money can satisfy $700 billion in government debt obligations, but $700 billion in public debt remains, upon which interest is due from the moment the money is created.

Which of the two are more inflationary? $700 billion in fiat money that satisfies obligations in full? – or $700 billion in fiat debt money that demands repayment, plus interest, even after it has satisfied $700 billion in obligations (thus requiring that $700 billion, plus interest, be created and borrowed in the future)?

It sounds like a no brainer. But they'll tell us that $700 billion in fiat Greenbacks is inflationary, while $700 billion dollars in fiat debt Federal Reserve money is "sound money."

But what of this huge $700 billion figure? It was apparently pulled out of a hat by somebody as a number sufficiently large to convince everyone that decisive action is being taken to remedy the problem. President Bush is way out of his depth in the current economic emergency, and must have felt that $700 billion would make a sufficient case for decisive action on the part of the administration.

It is a big number – about $2,300.00 for every man, woman, and child in the nation! To get a focus on this, the nation has an overall zero, or negative, savings rate. So this $700 billion represents more than $700 billion more than the savings of the entire American population!

Americans with a negative savings rate are already in hoc to the tune of over $9.7 trillion dollars of acknowledged public debt – over $32,000.00 for every man, woman, and child! (see the debt at http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/).

As a nation, we took total leave of our senses well over a generation ago – with the Reagan administration having had the distinction of presiding over a critical divide. The great divide was when we crossed over from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation – and when we went from a net producing nation to a net importing nation.

Reagan, who campaigned on a balanced budget platform, announced that we were entering into a post-industrial economic era. We were becoming a "service economy" rather than an industrial economy, he said, and a "new international economic order" was at hand.

He'd apparently become convinced it was a good thing. He thought a deregulated global free market economy would benefit all of mankind. America would become just a high end consumer market stall in a global marketplace, and the rest of the world would see that the selves would always be full. International interdependence, rather than national economic independence, would become the mantra of American capitalism. We would get more by producing less.

Reagan didn't "do" that, he only announced what was already becoming the new reality. The situation was already out of control when he first ran for office, and the die had already been cast for what we have today – the Never-Never Land economy (a whole New World Order), brought on by our bought and paid for mis-representatives at the behest of financial capital.

We had already had our monetary and foreign oil dependence wake up calls almost ten years before Reagan came to power. But we were in a daze due to our debacle in Vietnam, and were no longer seeing clearly at any level.

Looking back, the Vietnam War was what finally destroyed our nation. We lost a lot more than the war – a war in which we consistently saw light at the end of the tunnel – right up until cut and run time. We'd won World War Two – which was the major global disaster of the century. We won, but it changed our national political character in such fundamental ways that we would never again be the nation we once were. Nor would the world be the same.

We'd muddled through Korea. But we were still economically strong and essentially fiscally sound. But the chickens came home to roost with Vietnam. It had been one war too far. It forced abandonment of gold as the international monetary standard and we surged into an international credit standard, providing the world with a substitute in the form of debt currency. This would eventually separate us from economic reality. Our prosperity would thereafter be purchased on credit.

Reagan was taken in, of course, and called for more steam, thinking the light at the end of the tunnel was the glow of the economic Promised Land. Our system vanquished the power of the Soviet Union, only to run up against the woe of economic reality in the fullness of time.

We have finally come up against the light at the end of the tunnel, and it wasn't daylight – it was an oncoming train!

And, here we are – trying to figure out what when wrong, and when – and where to we go from here. It's time to pay the piper – but with what? More debt.

All is not lost yet, of course. Our problems are fundamentally financial now, but we have two wars going, and bigger ones on the horizon – war being the only certain means by which to totally take leave of the economic laws necessary to govern the peace.

John Q. Pridger

IF WE BROUGHT THE GOOD OLD GREENBACK BACK...

Congress has proven that it cannot be trusted to manage the nation's fiscal affairs. So it makes a good argument that they could not be trusted to manage the nation's monetary system. It takes a banker to do that.

Tuesday, 23 September, 2008

BUYING THE ECONOMY

Our current economic crisis is so bad that the taxpayer, and his progeny, is effectively being forced to buy the whole mess – to the tune of at least $700 billion, and probably a lot more than that before it's all done. A word for this might nationalization. But maybe not, if we don't at least end up "owning" the whole mess. If the public actually ended up owned the whole mess, it might be possible to begin cleaning it up and turning it to the public benefit.

So the big question is, are we actually buying the mess, or are we merely rewarding those who made the mess, and leaving them in charge of the clean up? This remains to be seen. But, most likely, We the People are merely being had again – but in a bigger way than ever before.

Hopefully some of our legislators will review the "rescue package" before signing us up. Not that there is much hope in this, of course. Collectively, over a period of decades, our mis-representative have effectively been just as guilty as the financial and market casino operators. In fact they are the main culprits.

It's pretty difficult to squeeze good out of a bad deal. But if the public could end up owning a bunch of deflated balloons and begin pumping them up again, it would be far better than being coerced into paying somebody else to re-inflate somebody else's balloons.

John Q. Pridger

NO "BUSINESS" SHOULD EVER BE TOO BIG TO FAIL

Today, under what was falsely billed as a "free market economy," so much wealth has been amassed in so few hands that the roster of "institutions" that are too big to fail is surprisingly short in spite of ourselves.

Once our national strength was vested in millions of modest sized family farms, and millions of small businesses occupying the Main Streets and downtowns of larger cities. Now huge corporations that have grown up around the private debt money power infect the entire nation and threaten to bring it down.

Local bankers were powerful businesses, but they were not too big to fail. If they weren't careful enough with their loans and mortgage terms, they would fail.

There's a new Super Wal-Mart being built in Pridger's hometown of about 9,000 souls. Wal-Mart is everywhere – and it's another business that's too big to fail. But only when the Wal-Marts and other mega-businesses fail (and allowed to do so when they do [which they will]), will Main Street once again become a congenial place for Mom & Pop businesses, and the countryside once again inviting to those willing to work the land for a living? Hopefully, that will be the case.

In this age of mega-business, with financial capital as king, the government has increasingly been failing us for decades – thus the disappearance of millions of small family farms and locally owned business enterprises, which were the backbone of the "real" free market economy we once had.

The New World Order was built to provide a "global free market economy" for the big boys – the ones that could straddle oceans and the entire globe. It wasn't a free market economy at all, but one "set up" to serve financial capital and at the expense personal capital and undercut sole proprietorship businesses. It was deregulated so it was able to set its own rules, and reap the rewards that only monopolists are able to reap.

Greed is bringing it down – for financial capital was not satisfied with the good or great profits it had always enjoyed. It had to cut corners and try to grab it all, by getting into big-stake gambling. It thought it finally had the world by the short hairs. It was so big that it thought it was too big to fail.

John Q. Pridger

Sunday, 21 September, 2008

THE DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON'T, ECONOMY

That's an unenviable position to be in – damned if you do, and damned if you don't. That's America's present economic situation. There's simply nowhere to go but down. The only "solutions" available are painful. But that's where we are. The bad news is that the "real" solutions aren't even on the table yet.

The good news is that the government will intervene in an attempt to save some of the biggest baddest boys and thereby somewhat cushion our fall and mitigate the pain to most of us – hopefully. But Pridger isn't taking any bets because we are so far out into economic Never-Never Land, and have been for so long, that the situation may be too far out of control to effect a soft landing. In other words, the landing may be softened in the short term, but just as devastating in the long term.

Our astute leaders (themselves led by a greedy financial capital establishment), have led us far out onto an overhanging economic precipice – so high and so far out that "we've never had it so good" (to put it in their terms). But the substance under our feet, and the soaring balloons that have buoyed us, are no longer able to bear our obese weight.

It's not as if the warning signs were not there all along the Yellow Brick Roadway. It's just that our leaders ignored them as the financial sector gloried in its plunder – and our politicians were rewarded handsomely with campaign contributions. And neither of our prospective presidents seem to have a clew. Only two of our major presidential contenders tried to address the problem. Those were Ron Paul and Denise Kucinich – both of whom were counted out early in the game.

The Chief Economic Policy Adviser of Kucinich's presidential campaign was a guy named Dr. Michael Hudson – a financial economist and historian who has a focus on just what our economic problems are. He, for one, has been sounding alarm bells for a long time. Hudson lays things out and on the line in a manner even Obama and McCain might comprehend if they were inclined to listen.

Hudson isn't a conspiracy theorist, of course, but an establishment intellectual whose credentials perhaps match or surpass those of Carroll Quigley, because of his experience and insights as a longtime economist within the corporate community. He has watched our economic metamorphosis from decently regulated and prosperous industrial capitalism to a deregulated financial capitalists' free for all – through a neo-liberal "new international economic order" to our present neo-conservative, finance driven, empire in disguise – now commonly known as the New World Order.

In early 2008, when Bear Stearns and JP Morgan/Chase came face to face with reality, Hudson was making quips like "saving an economy-wide Ponzi Scheme" and "baling out the tip of the economic ice berg." But Hudson can tell us exactly how and why our economy has ended up in such a mess. And he may be able to tell our leaders how we can get out of it. Pridger recommends reading some of his articles at:

http://www.michael-hudson.com

http://www.michael-hudson.com/articles/

Dr. Hudson's web site says "He is now writing a new tax policy for the United States." In the wake of our present, much accelerated economic woes, he may even be on the brink of making a serious case for some fundamental changes that go beyond government bailouts of the wobbly financial establishment. He may be getting closer to serious "monetary reform," in advocating that solutions may lie more with the Treasury rather than with the Federal Reserve. We'll have to stay tuned on this.

John Q. Pridger

Thursday, 18 September, 2008

WHY MOST PROGRESSIVES DON'T GET IT

Pridger considers himself somewhat of a progressive – but a better description would be that he's a conservative who believes in positive progress, while preserving the things that have served us well in the past. By this he means progress that leads clear of as many unintended catastrophic consequences as possible.

The Progressive magazine has just sent Pridger a subscription solicitation. Now there's a lot of progressives that Pridger agrees with on certain issues. Where Pridger parts company with many progressives is in a certain level of our world view. Most modern progressives seem to be social internationalists, as apposed to business and militant internationalists as in the case of neo-conservatives.

Pridger is neither. Though just as much of a "citizen of the world" as anybody, Pridger still holds that tending to our own national interests is the only real business of "our" government. Thus, politically, Pridger is still a "nationalist" despite the fact the term has become as mis-understood as as the words isolationist, and protectionist.

Take the following from The Progressive's subscription letter – quoting contributing writer Howard Zinn:

"It seems to me there are two reasons why the American people were so easily fooled by Bush on the Iraq War. The reasons go deep into our national culture, and help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death of hundreds of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

"One is in the dimension of time, that is, and absence of historical perspective... If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply carving knives... The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."

Mr. Zinn is both right and wrong. And where he's wrong, he's dead wrong. We've not been over in Iraq causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people for reasons that go historically deep into our national culture. We're over there for reasons that go deep only into our superficial, post World War Two, "internationalist culture." The modern internationalist aspect of American culture is a literal refutation of our birthright national culture of isolationism, protectionism, and nationalism – and it is equally a product both progressive and imperialist corporate interests.

Pridger agrees that "If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply carving knives." So let's go a little deeper into our own history and take a look at our nation's founding principles – those were our national culture until progressives and imperialists combined to find a larger mission for our nation.

Unfortunately, most progressives can't look that far back into our national culture without getting all tangled up and confused over our few national birth defects and some of the unavoidable negative aspects of human nature itself.

Long before we became an imperialist power, seeking concurrently to both exploit and reform the world, we were a modestly strong and self-reliant nation. Yet, to most Americans, the United States was (and still is), viewed as the center of our universe. They believed then, as fewer and fewer believe now, they possessed exceptional virtue, were admirable, and quite superior.

That just happens to be how people and nations think of themselves. It's human nature moved to the collective national level. Massai tribesmen think the same way of themselves and their culture. When they cease thinking they are a superior people, with a superior culture, their tribe, and their way of life, will simply disappear.

Liberal progressives swear by Darwin' theory on the biological side, but totally neglect or deny it on the social and political side. Survival of the fittest applies as equally to man, the social and political animal, as it does to all biological species. Races, cultures, religions, and nations have the very same survival instincts that govern genetic development and survival of biological organisms. In other words, nations tend to want to survive.

Nations can only survive as long as their human components are convinced their nation is something special. Loose or abandon that national will – say (in our case), in favor of "One World" – and "nation" will be lost. One World, will not follow, however. Other nations will simply become dominant.

Of course, we know we are not the center of the universe, and that all other nations and peoples have the same rights and aspirations we do. Some (perhaps even many), of them may actually be superior to us in some ways. But when we cease striving to make our nation a better, more virtuous, and a more admirable, and truly generous, nation – and, yes, believing in our own innate national superiority – our nation will fall into decline even faster than it already is.

If we returned to our nation cultural roots of benign but generous isolationism, and an enlightened degree of trade protectionism, we'd undoubtedly see our national fortunes rise, and soon we'd once again be a nation worthy of respect – not for our military power, but for our successful economic and political institutions, and our respect for others.

Isolationism, in the America context, is nothing more than tending to our own business, and letting others tend to their own. Protectionism is nothing more than looking after our own store (our owner-operated marketplace), and conducting our international trade in a manner that is best suited to benefit American workers, conceding to all other nations the right to the same.

American nationalism is no longer, and should not be construed, as and aggressive and threatening nationalism. Our era of conquest and territorial expansion is over. It ended with the acquisition of Hawaii. And the age of western colonialism is over. What we need to do now is shed our notion that we have a mission to remake the world in our increasingly tarnished image, and bring McEconomy to everybody everywhere.

We can't rule the world (as the militant neo-con internationalists would like), and the world can't be administered as one happy little village (as the liberal/progressive internationalists would like). But our nation can be ruled as a progressive, prosperous, and generous nation among nations in a peaceful world.

But we cannot do this if we decide that our country is not special – first and foremost to us. It isn't "Our country, right or wrong." It's about making sure our country measures up to its own founding principles. If it isn't doing that, we've got to fix it – the United States – not Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or Russia. If we can fix our own nation, and make it whole again, we could once again become an example of enlightened governance and free market principles to the rest of the world. And a successful and prosperous America could afford to be generous to less fortunate peoples and nations, rather than bossy and mean spirited under a false mantle of "doing good" by military means, using troops, bombs, and missiles as our missionary messengers as we are now doing.

If we could elect a president who would announce to the world that America was returning to its own ideological political roots, the world would rejoice, and anti-America terrorism would soon loose its appeal even among the most radical of Moslems. Peace would again have a chance.

Of course, we couldn't disengage in a disruptive, precipitous way that would cause an global economic collapse. It would have to be a carefully measured disengagement, taking the welfare of a lot of others into consideration.

There would still be problems galore in the world, of course. Maybe things in the rest of the world would have to sort themselves out in less than a strictly peaceful fashion. The results might not always be to our liking. But they would sort themselves out without our contribution to, or enlargement of, the carnage. We have supposedly sought peace and global stability, but we have delivered increased turmoil and suffering wherever we have lifted our heavy hand. It's time for this to stop. We've preached self-determination and then attempted to determine the outcome ourselves through economic and military coercion. We cannot do that and remain true to our own governing principles.

John Q. Pridger

Wednesday, 17 September, 2008

CONSTITUTION DAY – R.I.P.

The Constitution of the United States was ratified on this date in 1787, and a new nation found its legs, as a Constitutional Republic. Today the Constitution Rests in Peace under glass in Washington, D.C. Though it is still the official Law of the Land, and many of it's Sections and more recent amendments are still observed, the letter of the Constitution is no longer strictly adhered to by the government it sought to limit and make subordinate to the people. MAY IT SOMEDAY BE RESURRECTED!

Every high elected official and officer in the military takes a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Let pray that not all of them take that oath with crossed finger, and that some of them will actually read it and respect it – even start to take the oath seriously.

The Constitution is only a few pages long, and quite easy to read and understand. However, during the 221 years since the Constitution was ratified, Federal Laws and "programs" have gone on to cover the nation like a thick wet blanket – most of them dating from 1913 onward with great surges in "lawmaking" circa 1933 and since World War Two.

Federal laws have gone from paragraph size, or a couple of pages in length, to literary tome size. In recent decades, legislation is written by think tanks and special interests (the professional lawmakers), and passed without our "representatives" bothering to read any more than the title and a brief synopsis. And these are the laws of the land – stacks upon stacks upon stacks of them.

Pridger is just guessing, but probably the lion's share of those federal laws and regulations, would not pass constitutional muster.

Beginning circa 1980s, "deregulation" became the watch word. Reagan said he wanted to get the government off our – the People's – backs. But the machinery he unleashed apparently misread the speech, and substituted "finance" and "major corporations" for "the people." The very entities that needed the most stringent regulation were unleashed on the global stage, and We the People have continued to be increasingly regulated. Capitalist finance and the corporations were given license to take the world. They did, and now they may be taking it down.

John Q. Pridger

THE SECRET TO MEDICAL BILLING

Pridger has had friends who have lost their jobs and gone for job retraining. One of the training programs being promoted is "medical billing." There's supposed to be a lot of opportunity in this field, including being able to work from home. In the instances Pridger knows about, the retrained workers were unable to find a job in their chosen field. "See I told you so," Pridger told them, "this is one of the fields that's being outsourced to India!"

But maybe there is money to be made in medical billing after all. An accident sent a family member to the emergency room a month and a half ago. The wound was stitched up and various tests made, including a CAT scan.

Obviously, bills start arriving in the mail soon after such a mishap – appropriately compounding the bad luck. Some of the bills are obviously connected to the hospital and procedures done. But then several small, and not so small, bills from others unknown parties begin arriving in the mail – sometimes a month or more after the event.

Of course, we assume (or are supposed to assume), they are legitimate bills from various specialists that happened to breeze through the emergency room at "our" critical time, or somehow got a look at the CAT scan images – independent contractors.

It occurs to Pridger that some of them might be retrained independent professional medical billing entrepreneurs. Maybe they have found they can bill anybody who has had a recent visit to the hospital. Study the local paper or hospital registry, then bill everybody whose name appear, being very careful to be nonspecific about what service is being billed for. Just a thought.

With the purchasing power of Pridger's retirement income in precipitous decline, he might find it necessary to give this a try. Dr. John Q. Pridger, MD. (Monotonous Diatribalist). If a bill is challenged by a suspicious patient, Pridger's response will be, "What! You didn't get the diatribe? Sorry, there must have been some sort of a foul-up. All charges will be promptly and cheerfully refunded."

John Q. Pridger

DOWN WITH THE CASINO ECONOMY

Presidential candidate John McCain may not know beans about the economy, and economics in general, but he did say something today that sparked at least the suggestion of hope. He made reference to the necessity of putting an end to the "casino culture" on Wall Street. He said he'd change the way Washington does business, too, and take on the "good old boys" network.

Obama observes that for John McCain, a 26 year veteran of the political establishment, the good old boys network would be a staff meeting.

The problem isn't just Wall Street, it's our entire political culture and the New World Order mentality that infects both Washington and the world.

"Our crisis" is indeed global, because our astute politicians have invested our future in "international interdependence" rather than a safe and independent nation.

Those who can are divesting themselves of vulnerable stocks and other investments, and putting their money in "safe" havens – like gold and "treasury bills." Gold has jumped by $90.00 an ounce, the highest one day jump in history.

A financially and economically safe, independent, and stable, America would go a long way towards facilitating a financially safe, stable, and peaceful world.

The thing to file away in the back of your mind is that "Treasuries" are still considered a safe investment. This is both significant and rather perplexing, because treasury notes and bonds are the "security" instruments of the very Treasury that is now being looted to buoy up the crumbling financial world.

Another leading economic indicator – the Forbs 400 richest men did not get richer this year. Their fortunes were stagnant or down. They're apparently suffering just like us poor working, or retired, stiffs. We feel their pain. But their pain is a significant bellwether – telling us that something has fundamentally changed.

John Q. Pridger

TOTALLY WEIGHTLESS DEBT

So AIG gets an $85,000,000,000.00 public loan guarantee for its folly. That makes sense – especially if we gain 80% public ownership stake in that monument to folly. If a heavy hitter like AIG failed, reality might really begin to intrude – and that would probably wreck the entire global economy, causing all sorts of hardship and pain.

But, really, there's nothing to worry about. The economy is essentially strong – but exploding bubbles of incalculable size could be very disruptive. So the bigger bubbles must not be allowed to pop, because they might set off all the smaller bubbles. All of the hot air escaping from those bubbles could cause the dry sand under the house of cards to shift.

They tell us that the price tag for saving the system from itself has so far reached about the $800 billion level – a significant amount of money.

But eight hundred billion here and eight hundred billion there is no problem. It's just more public debt, and there appears to be no real limit to how high that can go. It only takes an act of Congress to raise the debt ceiling, and the Treasury and the Fed have a whole bag of Voodoo Economic tricks they can employ. In a pinch, we don't even have to depend on China or Japan to underwrite our increasing debts. All we have to do is return to the old mantra of "we owe it to ourselves" by bypassing secondary creditors and mortgaging our own future.

While most sane economists worry about the public debt, and even cite a belief that laws of physics cannot be perpetually violated with impunity, there's really no reason to worry. It's only debt. Ultimately debt is little more than an troublesome abstraction.

The government itself abandoned fiscal responsibility a long time ago, because it knows there is no limit to the debt burden it can shoulder. They know the people will stand behind it – we have no choice (our mis-representatives see the that). What does it matter anyway? We'll never have to repay it, because the burden can be spread so easily into the indefinite future. There's an unlimited supply of future generations to carry the bulk of the burden. None of those future generations have complained or voted against it yet.

Future generations go so far into the future that any amount of debt can be accommodated. In fact, the higher the public debt goes, the lighter the burden becomes. That ought to be obvious. The laws of physics actually work in our favor once a certain threshold it passed.

Congress has the power to raise the debt ceiling – in fact, that seems to be the only thing our mis-representatives are good for any more. They have become very good at it. The higher the ceiling goes, the lighter it gets. At some point it will become totally weightless. When that happens, it simply slips into orbit. Problems solved!

In the mean time, however, we need to figure out how to replace fallacy and fantasy with something a little more real. Even before our debt has been successfully launched into high orbit, never to be seen again, and the books cleared, we'll need to find a workable substitute for the Never-Never Land monetary and financial system that we've been using.

John Q. Pridger

MONEY AND MONEY – IN A NUTSHELL

Ignoring gold and silver, which are about the only historically recognized money that we can put a hundred percent trust in, we have two kinds of fiat currency (fiat currency, meaning paper and token coins that owe their legal tender status strictly to the fiat [an edict, command, or stamp of approval] of government). (1) Federal Reserve currency that we all use today, and (2) Genuine Greenbacks, which we used to use for at least a percentage of our currency. Both types of money can more or less be created out of thin air.

Federal Reserve money is created and issued by creating an interest bearing debt. The Treasury secures the debt by issuing treasury notes, bonds, and other government securities. These "securities" can be thought of as collateral for loans, backed up by the full faith and credit of the nation.
When Federal Reserve money is created it, represents an ongoing interest bearing obligation of the government, and thus We the People.
Federal Reserve money never satisfies the obligation it represents. It isn't the government's money nor the peoples' money – it's banker money. In order to bring it into existence, the government must assume a debt. Then, to get its hands on it, it has to tax the people or borrow it. But even when the government gets it and spends it to satisfy an obligation, the debt doesn't go away.
Greenbacks are money created by the Treasury. They are their own security and satisfy any obligation which they are spent to satisfy. Obligations are created independent of money, and greenback money satisfies them without leaving an ongoing debt in its wake. They need no Treasury "security" backing, because they ARE themselves Treasury securities. They are Treasury Notes, called U.S. Notes – backed up by the full faith and credit of the nation.

Which kind of money should we be using? One that creates and increases public indebtedness when created and paid out, or one that is simply created and satisfies debt by being paid out? But this is a far too simple and obvious a solution to our monetary problem be taken seriously.

Government simply printing and spending treasury notes as currency? Preposterous! Yet we've heard it in the news – investors are shifting from stocks into "treasuries" as a safe investment! They are supposedly the next best thing to gold itself. United States Notes (greenbacks), are nothing but "treasuries" in small currency-sized denominations!

This isn't a new idea. This is the idea, and the remedy, the Lincoln administration came up with to finance the Civil War. The greenback has been part of our monetary culture since that time – until the bankers finally managed to kill the idea in the 1960s. Time to wake up!

Investors are fleeing stocks for gold and treasury bills. The greenback – the old dollar bill – is a treasury bill. Why are treasury bills good enough to be the last resort of well healed investors, but not good enough to serve as the first option available for use by the working and spending public?

The bankers and their bought and paid for economists and politicians objected to greenbacks because they were "inflation money." But can anybody stand up with a straight face and tell us that Federal Reserve money is not inflation money? It has become more than self-evident that Federal Reserve money is inflation money on steroids, if not more powerful drugs. The world is literally drowning in them – and the world is crying out for relief!

It's time to wake up!

John Q. Pridger

Tuesday, 16 September, 2008

MAKING A SOW'S EAR FROM A SILK PURSE
WE HAVE CONSTRUCTED OUR OWN VULNERABILITIES

For over two generations, we have been constructing our own national vulnerabilities. We've done it, in part, by deconstructing the industrial economy that made us into a strong and enviably self-reliant nation. Another word for national self-reliance is "Independence." It's gone. We're independent in name only. Our leaders hitched our national wagon to "international interdependence" and made a religion of "free trade" and globalism. The result is proving disastrous – as anybody with some common sense should have foreseen.

And here we are – still dependent on foreign oil, 35 years after our first big scary national wake-up call. Here we are – dependent on China (et. al.), to keep our consumer marketplace filled with almost everything we need to enjoy the "American way of life." And here we are – depending on the same foreign sources for credit to keep out economy perking and our war-making machinery oiled. Here we are – watching our economic bubbles bursting one by one, and sometimes two or three at a time. Today's flavor is American International Group (AIG), supposedly the largest insurance company in the world. What will tomorrow bring?

No bank or other financial organization, no insurance company, no corporation, and certainly no store, could ever become "too big to be allowed to fail" in a sane system. That isn't what free enterprise and healthy competition are supposed to mean. A sane system is a system where capital and businesses of every kind are distributed as widely as possible among "people" and corporations of reasonable size. No corporation should be allowed to gain so much size and power to enable it to command such a large slice of the nation's economic pie that "it cannot be allowed to fail" when it goes wrong. When a business goes wrong, it should fail.

Under our system of financial capitalism, credit money has been made to flow like water going over Niagara Falls, going to both the worthy and unworthy – when credit should be a precious thing to be carefully and conservatively used only to good and worthy purpose, toward solid goals with careful accounting.

The major developments now threatening to bring us down have all happened during Pridger's working lifetime. It has been a gut wrenching thing to watch. And it's all been has been there for everybody to see. Of course, the underlying causes have been there much longer. They have been there for everybody to see too, of course. But who cared, as long as we seemed to be moving on up – or at least well entertained? Nobody believed in anything as exotic as a conspiracy. They didn't want to believe. Our trajectory was so "promising" and was seen as a happy convergence of progress and happenstance.

Good leadership (we must have been sold on it), combined with good luck, brought us the "prosperity" we have known since abandoning the national traits of isolationism, protectionism, and economic independence. We were so great and successful as a nation that our leaders couldn't stand it. They decreed that we had to transform the world into what they thought we were. And to do that, we had to abandon our historical American Creed, along with almost everything that had made us a great nation.

The social and capitalist Utopians – cosmopolitan internationalists all – combined to do it. It was all with the very best of intentions, of course. Both Republican and Democratic parties signed on and went along. Congress signed us up. The New World Order, like the United Nations, was "made in the U.S.A." (They were "our" baby, so they had to be good. Right?).

Our stellar mis-representatives, using the brightest and the best, steered the ship of state cum ship-o-the world into a New World Order. Think tanks did all the thinking, presidential administrations bought into the various bills of goods, and Congress rubber stamped our national decline at every step of the way – some of them even believing they were taking us up the river rather than selling us down the river. We're over fed aren't we? We're almost all on line. Hasn't it all been great?

The chips are beginning to fall as the dry sand shifts, ever so slightly, under the cards that represent the greatest, most wonderful, edifice of all times – one essentially built in a little more than a single generation. The future is uncertain. Even the climate is changing as nature seeks inevitable correction. Everybody was happy, but now they're becoming a little worried. And for good reason.

Our national leadership has mis-managed and spoiled the greatest socio-political experiment in the history of mankind. They have taken a silk purse and darned if it doesn't look like they've made a sow's ear out of it!

We are destined to live in interesting times.

John Q. Pridger

Monday, 15 September, 2008

GOT YOUR CRASH HELMET ON FOR "CHANGE"?

While the Obama and McCain campaigns continue to dance "change" to the tune of the blame game, we'd better start getting ready for the change that's in store for us.

Quite frankly, the leading economic indicators aren't looking very rosy. Things have been slipping for some time, but an avalanche may have begun.

Skipping all the wake-up calls we've had since the turn of the century, in addition to the Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae collapse federal takeovers, we now see Layman Brothers crumbling and Merrill Lynch saving itself by selling itself in a fire sale to Bank of America. And today the DOW was down some 500 points.

Obama has come up with an astute observation, he said the pain of the working class is finally beginning to "trickle up" to some of the richest people and institutions in America. He's right, trickle up is the natural and inevitable counterpoint to Reagan's "trickle down" economic theory. Deregulation of the banking and financial industries has taken its toll, and now the tune is going to be "regulation!" Quick! But it's already too late.

Back in the 1990s, while stock market pushers were predicting a DOW of 10,000 by the turn of the century, Pridger, tongue in cheek, said that it should more likely be 2,000 by year 2000. The DOW made 10,000 by 2000, but Pridger still feels his prediction was probably closer to "reality." But the market had already departed from reality some years before. Reality is threatening to set in now, however.

At that time Pridger also opined that "derivatives" were the AIDS/HIV of the financial system. Again, reality is setting in. And where it will stop, nobody knows.

We're certainly not seeing a repeat of what triggered the Great Depression. We haven't seen a real stock market crash yet. Bank failures were the result of the stock market crash of 1929 – thousands of small and medium sized banks were allowed to go under, while most of the big boys remained strong in order to pick up the pieces. Now we are seeing some of the biggest boys crash first – hoping it won't lead to a stock market crash.

Our stellar financial and economic gurus have things so well "fine tuned" that the crash is happening backwards this time – with mega-implications! We're shocked to see a few big bubbles pop, but the fact is, the entire financial system is a huge "Never-Never Land" bubble!

Just to point out how far we have become removed from a truly rational system, just take the huge housing mortgage and housing construction problem. In a rational free market system, something as fundamental as housing would be strictly a "local problem" – concerning home owners and aspiring home owners, local housing construction contractors, and local lending institutions. But somehow, because of the way things "work" in our financial savvy age, we ended up with almost our housing eggs in two big baskets, known as Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. One wonders how such a perversion of rationality could ever come into being?

Well, maybe we know. We live in the New World Order, but it's becoming clear that what a lot of us have been saying all along is true – it's really a New World Disorder. And the disorder is getting worse. When Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, and Layman Brothers, crumbled, not only did American home owners and investors get burned, but China, Japan, and a host of other nations got burned too! And we're essentially talking about American home owner mortgages!!! This is not only amazing, but downright pitiful. Homes and real property are supposed to be the most solid investments of all. What's happened?

What we could be seeing is the beginning of the nationalization of the nation's financial system – made necessary to stave off a generalized stock market crash and a chaotic economy. In the future, we can expect further extraordinary emergency measures to be implemented in order to stave off mass financial panic. And because our financial system infects the entire global financial system – including the mega-corporations that make the global economy function on a workaday basis – the entire world is at risk.

In the mean time, our presidential candidates try to remain poised and relevant, exchanging comments about the right to life, pregnant unwed daughters, and lipstick on hogs – along with some tough talk about winning the war on Terror – and that Russia better shape up or suffer the consequences.

So let's turn away from the two ring presidential campaign circus for a while and take another view of our prospects for change. The following excerpts are from an article written by Richard C. Cook, entitled "The Crash of Western Capitalist Civilization?." It paints a pretty bleak picture, but one Pridger feels is pretty much on target.

WHO IS RICHARD C. COOK?

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His Challenger website is at www.richardccook.com . A new economics website at www.RealSustainableLiving.com is upcoming with partner/author Susan Boskey. To get on his mailing list, for questions and comments, or to pre-purchase copies of his new book, please write EconomicSanity@gmail.com .

The Crash of Western Capitalist Civilization?

“Train-wreck” doesn't even begin to describe what is starting to happen to the U.S. today with the financial crisis, an onrushing depression, and the failure of George W. Bush's war policy as he is faced down by Iran and the Russian bear.

But in an even broader sense, the West, as a civilization, after a century of world war and the utter failure of global finance capitalism, may have reached its limits.

...For the last 500 years, the West has been striding across the globe, armed to the teeth with firearms, warships, bombers, and—more recently—depleted uranium, enforcing the “white man's burden” by enslaving nations and peoples and confiscating everything of value—ranging from art objects to gold to oil—that can be carried away.

The financiers behind it all have also used the diabolically clever practice of creating money “out of thin air” to put the natives everywhere into debt, and, when that has proven insufficient, of doing the same to their own populations.

All this is rationalized by various brands of racism, cultural superiority, social Darwinism, historical determinism, “dominion of the Elect,” “God's chosen people,” etc. Or, simply, “might makes right.”

Some call it “The New World Order.”

Let's stop here a minute so Pridger can make a couple of observations. We have been told, at least since the Reagan administration, that global "free markets" – and what we now call globalism (by which we mean collectivist global capitalism) – and the New World Order itself – represents the epitome of our success as a nation.

Collectivist capitalism, underwritten by financial capital, is the process by which, as Thomas Jefferson put it, banks (financial capitalists), control issuance of our currency, and then, "first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."

And he told us "...that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties that standing armies... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the Government to whom it properly belongs." (He was speaking of the first Bank of the United States – now we must say it of the Federal Reserve System.)

Today our children are taught that Jefferson is just another tarnished "dead white man," and his wisdom and insights would be useless in our more enlightened era, even if he wasn't a slave owner.

We did progress as a nation (spectacularly, but not without error), until international financial capital finally solidified it's position, using the United States as its new base. When financial capital finally gained total control (first of our currency, then our national destiny), all of the self-evident truths that our founders spoke so hopefully and forcefully of, began to be replaced by other truths – "truths" so alien to our founding creed that by now our metamorphosis into something totally different is so complete that our nation would no longer be recognized by the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

So today, we Americans, denizens of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” victors in two world wars, bearers of “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq, allies of the brave Israelis who hold high the banner of Judeo-Christian values among the ungrateful Palestinians—well, we Americans owe our own bankers almost $70 trillion at most recent count. With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we owe holders of bad housing loans, including the governments of China, Korea, and Japan, another few trillion.

The bluster of Kissinger, Brzezinski, the Kristols, the Christian fundamentalists, and their paid-off politicians and media millionaires notwithstanding, America—indeed, the entire West—has been found out, perhaps even checkmated on the world stage.

We have been "found out" because we long ago betrayed our own national charter and everything it stood for. The national leadership stands exposed as a combine of hypocrites, imposters, and little more than agents of international financial capital. Ironically, the "success" of financial capital, and its New World Order creation, means certain disaster of one kind or another, for it is the embodiment of the prototypical haughty Emperor without clothes, living in castles built on shifting sands, out of cards.

Already huge financial institutions – lynchpins the financial establishment – are failing at an alarming rate. Because they are far too important and "too big to fail," the greater public (a.k.a., We the People) is being forced to shoulder the unbelievable debt burden of keeping them afloat in order to cushion the inevitable collapse of the American and global economy.

It's American Federal Reserve System money in which the world is awash. The world is hip deep in the stuff. And the time is nigh – we're at a point where there will be a great washing out. The good old Yankee Dollar is becoming recognized as the poison it has become. As in the case of many "safe" and "worthwhile" medications, an overdose can be deadly.

There will be a continuing flight from the dollar to the Euro and other stronger currencies – but, in the final analysis, they are no better, and can only serve as a stop-gap on the march to reestablishing a more rational global exchange system and internally controllable national currencies, based on something more substantial, and less costly, than bank credit.

The financial and corporate balloons and bubbles are beginning to deflate and burst, but the pumps of public indebtedness are being energized and worked overtime in order to fill the void with enough dollars and warm air to save some of the elite and buoy public confidence. Soon even more extraordinary means will have to be employed to save the system and prevent massive pain and financial hardship.

Let us hope and pray that general monetary reform (and soon!), rather than general global warfare will be employed to save the day. War will not save the day (it will literally ruin a whole passel of days), though it might help get a handle on the population problem, at least in some regions.

Unfortunately, in spite of our worsening financial woes, monetary reform doesn't even appear to be a microscopic blip on the Obama/Biden McCain/Palin radar scopes – but war is more than just a blip. War is front and center, with two already conveniently underway, and bigger and better ones threatening.

The president of the United States is the Commander-In-Chief of the largest, most formidable, military machine on the face of the earth, but seldom is there a president with a comprehensive grasp of the actual geo-political landscape, and none seem to have the slightest understanding of economics – real economics. They are literally afraid to venture into the subject of monetary reform (albeit, undoubtedly with good reason).

Equally unfortunately, a lot can be accomplished through generalized warfare. Besides massive death and destruction, the entire economy can be nationalized, militarized, mobilized, under dictatorial military rule. The ordinary laws and rules of economics would no longer apply, and the rule of civil law itself, can be thrown totally out the window under martial law. And we all know what a very capable "can do" military establishment we have.

So, more of Mr. Cook's enlightening article:

The Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have blackened America's name forever. Iran has called our bluff. In Israel the gap between rich and poor is increasing as much as in the U.S. According to an article by Ian S. Lustick, the Palestinians have stood up to the Israelis to the point where more Jews are emigrating from that country than are moving in, and where those who remain are increasingly huddling around Tel Aviv as a safe haven. (Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck',” Middle East Policy , Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.)

In the 1990s, the European bankers used U.S. and NATO forces to dismember Yugoslavia so George Soros and the Rothschilds could gobble up Balkan resources. But that strategy is failing in the Caucasus, where the Russians fought back against the genocidal attack by Dick Cheney's poodle, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York-trained attorney the CIA got elected as the president of Georgia.

And now the people of Ukraine, the “Little Russians,” realizing what the West has in store for them, are rushing back into the Slavic fold and may be only a year or so away from reuniting with their “Great Russian” cousins across the border.

What is telling is to watch the Western financier press, chiefly the Washington Post and the New York Times , fume about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his “authoritarian” manner. An example is the article by Times correspondent Ellen Barry on Putin's September 11 press conference in Moscow. She wrote, “In three-and-a-half hours, in tones that were alternatively pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.”

I'm sorry, Ms. Barry. You and your editors may think your writing is cute, but Vladimir Putin is the foremost figure on the world stage today. He will remain so after George W. Bush leaves the White House disgraced.

Putin is heir to an epochal movement of patriots who began in the 1970s to take back Russia from within. It started with a base of operations within the KGB and the Orthodox Church, led to Gorbachev's glasnost in the 1980s, and culminated in the Second Russian Revolution of 1991. At that point, the Western financiers gleefully rushed in to support an assault from the Russian “oligarchs” who were looting Russia of everything it owned.

...From the mid-1970s to today, thousands of Russian gangsters, along with many hard-line Bolsheviks/Stalinists, were allowed to emigrate. Many settled in the U.S. and are here today, and many more settled in Israel. In fact, one reason the price of condos in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere has inflated so much reportedly is the flood of cash from racketeering.

...Today, Putin is cleaning out the remaining gangster class. His efforts reached a milestone in January with the arrest in Moscow of Semion Mogilevich, called “the world's most dangerous man.”

Putin has declared that the world will not be governed in a “unipolar” manner; i.e. by the U.S. military as the police force for the global financiers. This does not mean Russia has to be our enemy. In fact the world would be much better off, and much safer, if we joined with Russia as allies in keeping the peace.

But to do that our system would have to change, because finance capitalism is far too unstable to coexist with other nations as equals. It must either grow or die, because it always needs new victims to pay the interest on its usury practices and to finance its speculative balloons. As a last resort, it needs the kind of financial institution bailouts being engineered by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, where the only remaining stopgap is borrowing from public funds and adding to the national debt.

Once economic growth stops, as has now happened, and all the bubbles to restart it have blown up, as has also happened, the end really is nigh. Especially if the host—the U.S.—is bankrupt.

What is coming at us today isn't just another downturn. If people like McCain adviser Donald Luskin doubt it, maybe, instead of writing campaign propaganda, they should ask the fired CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stockholders of Lehman Brothers, whose shares have dropped ninety percent in less than a year, and the millions who are losing their homes.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are calling for “change.” Well, if I were standing on a beach with a 100-foot tsunami roaring in my direction, I would call for change too. Except I would not be standing around arguing about the meaning of the words “lipstick on a pig.”

By Richard C. Cook
http:// www.richardccook.com

Copyright 2008 by Richard C. Cook

Read the whole article at: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article6259.html

Richard C. Cook also addresses the matter monetary reform at some length. Here are some links to his insightful articles on the subject.

"Time to Change America by Challenging Economic Fundamentals"

"An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States"

"Monetary Reform and How a National Monetary System Should Work"

John Q. Pridger

Saturday, 13 September, 2008

ANOTHER TAKE ON BEING "PRO-LIFE"

Elizabeth Wright, publisher of I ssues & Views, takes Sarah Palin and pro-lifers to task on grounds that are seldom given the time they deserve. Her blog post, "Thank you for Nothing, Ms. Palin" is a reminder and wake up call:

I have said for years that pro-lifers (who deem themselves "conservative") are just as responsible for the explosion in illegitimate childbirth among girls and young women as are the liberals, whose social policies opened the door to decades of permissive advocacy. I reached this conclusion after years of listening to ardent, emotional propaganda from the pro-life camp, directed to impressionable females, who could easily interpret their messages as condoning the acts of getting banged, impregnated and abandoned. Outright heroization of illegitimate childbirth is as reckless as the incessant hyping of sex to the young. http://issuesviews.blogspot.com

Being pro-life, of course, is about a reverence for life – most particularly, human life. In the Christian context, it is very much a moral issue, and the moral aspects of human reproduction go far beyond just the protection on innocent life in the womb.

Ms. Wright brings up a very valid issue that certainly should be a major part of the pro-life discussion. Actually, many of us neglect the subject because we naturally "assume" that being pro-life also means advocating a whole array of moral and social concepts, i.e., being pro-abstinence prior to marriage, pro-traditional family, and pro-responsible parenting. But we sometimes forget what the pro-life message, in isolation, may seem to young women born and raised in an already well established "pro-promiscuous sex" and a "live-in boyfriend/girlfriend" society.

Many pro-life people forget to emphasis the other half of the equation, and they sometimes come across as advocating the idea that illegitimacy is okay though abortion is wrong – that the act of childbearing is good whether it occurs within the traditional family framework or not.

Not only have teen pregnancy and single mother families increasingly become the norm among women of the lower economic circumstances, but it's becoming "normal" among supposedly "responsible" professional women as well – and, amazingly, among many professing Christians.

Marriage and traditional family, they have learned, are no longer necessary – husbands are not only unnecessary, but usually a pain – yet many have concluded that having children remains a "very important" and fulfilling aspect of a woman's life (So, do "it" often, but do the child thing alone).

Not only has "family" come to mean what was once almost universally referred to as "living in sin," but the "pleasures of sex" has become a major social and commercial focal point in our society.

We have been a recreational sex, "do it if it feels good," society for almost two generations. AIDs only put a slight damper on promiscuous recreational sex – transforming it into more of a "find a safe partner" for recreational sex society (and a condom industry bonanza) – and now we have become a Viagra (Be ready when the time is right!) nation. (But see your doctor, if you can't get it off within four hours – or if you experience a sudden loss of vision or hearing.)

In the case of Sarah Palin, who is both religious and pro-life, having an unmarried pregnant daughter, Ms. Wright points out somewhat of a double standard, at least in the case of a professing "conservative." The point being that Mrs. Palin has apparently publicly given her blessing to the pregnancy, rather than publicly stating that it was an unfortunate mistake and a serious moral transgression. Ms. Wright is right, of course, but Palin's in a presidential race. Acknowledging morally touchy problems could cost her team the election.

Of course, most of us give Palin a little more of a break, and some credit for maintaining focus under pressure. Her daughter's pregnancy was an unfortunate case of a teenage daughter gone wrong, and a great embarrassment to her mother at a critical juncture of her political career. But, we rationalize, these things do happen even in the best of families – in fact we're so used to such things that it would be difficult to be sincere in any condemnation. Naturally, Palin chose to put the best face on the matter – the only real option she had – without publicly humiliating her daughter.

The fact that the father remains part of the equation, and marriage is intended, is a significant mitigating circumstance. The couple got the cart before the horse, but intend to harness up properly and, in the end, have a "legitimate" child, after a premature pregnancy, and, hopefully, a traditional and loving family unit will follow.

It's unlikely that Palin's other daughters will take their parent's acceptance of the circumstances as a lesson that "illicit" sex and pregnancy before marriage are okay. We presume them to be intelligent and insightful children, and that they will not only recognize that the horse should arrive ahead of the cart (and the harness in place even before that), but just how embarrassing this episode was, and how close this particular case of premarital sex came to wrecking their mother's vice presidential prospects.

John Q. Pridger

ALTERNATIVE LIFE STYLES

Though a social conservative, Pridger doesn't condemn alternative life styles. There's room for all kinds, and "all kinds" are part of what makes the world, and even our own nation, such a wonderfully interesting place.

What Pridger does condemn is wholesale abandonment of the nation's unifying culture and moral mores, and the promotion of the idea that "alternative life styles" are just as "normal" or "natural" as the traditional majority life style.

Pridger's old Pappy was both an eccentric and misfit. After his last divorce at the ripe old age of about 37, he spent his remaining 35 years living alone on a ridge with no running water or inside conveniences. He was perfectly happy with his lot, because he had plenty of time to read. But he never thought of starting a movement promoting such a lifestyle to others.

Pridger lives somewhat of an alternative lifestyle too – on the same ridge. And he readily admits he operates under the double standard mantle, believing that "Do as I say, not as I do," is perfectly legitimate. To illustrate with a somewhat extreme example, though a man may prefer to play Russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber, it's perfectly rational for him to teach his children to play by the rules and only load one chamber. A real hypocrite might preach that the game shouldn't be played at all.

Though many of us may be mavericks or misfits, we should realize that within a given national culture there should be a unifying "norm" if there is to be hope for a unified nation. The unifying norm should be the preferred norm of the great majority – usually determined by the predominate religious tradition, though it could be a political creed. The alternative life styles (not all of which are totally bizarre), are the legitimate realm of the mavericks, misfits, rebels, and eccentrics. A nation where everybody is a maverick, misfit, rebel, or eccentric cannot survive as a cohesive nation for very long.

And, speaking of maverick and alternative life styles, Sarah Palin must be up for some sort of a prize. Under her conservative mantle of traditional family and values, she glorifies in the "maverick" label. She's got to be a maverick to be a mother of five children while holding down more than just a full time, out-of-the-house, job.

Her husband is also a working man, so he can't quite qualify as a full time Mr. Mom. So, just who takes care of the house and all those children? They must participate in some sort of alternative life style. Are their children all latch-key kids? Does Mrs. Palin tote the baby and toddlers to the office with her on normal working days? Or are they among the truly rarified elite who can employ full time domestic help?

What about that call in the middle of the night scenario, if Palin should become president? What if the baby is crying and the hubby is somewhere on the North Slope? Which will she respond to first?

The vice president's residence, and maybe the White House, could be destined to become the alternative life style capital of the nation.

John Q. Pridger

THE PALIN INTERVIEW

Palin's televised interview with Charlie Gibson continued. She has continued to come across well, though she was a little slow on picking up on what the "Bush Doctrine" is. Like many of us, she apparently doesn't fully recognize that Bush has a "doctrine." Perhaps it sounded more like a religious question to her. What Gibson was asking, of course, was about her take on Bush's advocacy of "preventive" or "preemptive war" doctrine (especially on cooked intelligence).

When she realized what the question was about, she answered in a very intelligent, common sense, way – far short of endorsing Bush's particular idea of preventive war. She said, correctly, that military action is always a legitimate option in the case of a clear "eminent" threat from a foreign military power. She was careful enough in her answer to reserve the possibility that she doesn't approve of invading another nation merely on the basis of a "perceived" or "possible" future threat.

THE BUSH DOCTRINE

The Bush Doctrine (Pridger's definition): (1) The inalienable right of the executive, in his capacity of Commander-In-Chief, to wage war anywhere in the world to prevent a war that might never have materialized or ever have been even threatened – and doing it, if necessary, on maliciously manipulated intelligence reports, for reasons that are never intentionally made public. (2) The inalienable right of the executive branch to ignore Constitutional guarantees, torture enemy prisoners, designate foreign (or domestic), irregular patriots as "terrorists," and define foreign (or domestic), militia members, or individuals bearing arms, as illegal combatants. (3) The inalienable right of the executive branch to spy on anybody anywhere, at any time, in the name of national security and the War Against Terror. (Remember, every man, woman, and child on the planet is a potential terrorist and "illegal" enemy combatant, subject to Bush Justice.)

John Q. Pridger

PUNITIVE HEALTH CARE

There's little wonder that the soaring costs of health care has become a major issue on the minds of many Americans.

Just last month Pridger was personally reminded of the issue. Mrs. Pridger suffered a bizarre accident of a truly freakish nature – literally on her own doorstep. We had been "baby sitting" our daughter's dog "Symba" – a pretty good sized pup with a lot of pep.

Symba is a house dog, so he has to be taken out for a brief walk every once in a while. Suspecting that nature was calling our canine charge, the wife put the leash on him and proceeded to "take him out" the front door.

Our granddaughter was in view playing in the yard, so Symba was very eager to join the fun. As soon as the door was opened, Symba bolted full tilt toward the action outside. Mrs. Pridger had a firm grip on the leash handle so Symba wouldn't get away and perhaps go out an collect a lot to ticks to bring back into the house.

When Symba reached the extent of the leash, the jerk on the handle end was such that Mrs. Pridger was pulled from the door threshold and launched horizontally, head first, right off the edge of the porch, five feet away, landing about eight feet from where she stood. She was literally airborne at the end of the leash. She crashed, and crashed hard, face first, into the hard gravel covered ground!

The drop from the edge of the porch is only about 18 inches, but when a hundred and twenty pound woman flies horizontally from a standing position and lands on her face, the impact is considerable. And the forward momentum caused her to skid to a stop fully on her face! On hard ground and with limestone gravel on it.

She was momentarily knocked out, and when Pridger arrived only about a two seconds later, after hearing a very brief attempt at an exclamation, he feared the worst. "The damn dog's killed her!" was the ghastly thought in Pridger's mind.

She revived, but her face looked like she'd been in a train wreck, with abrasions from top to bottom of her face. Blood was flowing everywhere from an ugly gapping tear that separated her upper lip from the crease at the base of her nose. It was a terrible wound, about two inches long.

Pridger could immediately see that it wasn't something he could tape up with duct tape. A trip to the emergency room could not be avoided. It was an emergency, and no simple family physician is ever available without an advanced appointment.

We went to the hospital emergency room in town. Fortunately, Pridger's wife was the only emergency at hand at the time. The first order, of course, was to make sure she didn't have a fractured skull or any broken bones. So it was off to one of those amazingly costly machines, for a CAT scan.

The scan took about five or ten minutes. But then there was about a forty-five minute wait for "results" before the duty surgeon could get busy with his needle and sutures. The stitching job, requiring nine stitches, took about half an hour. The entire stay at the emergency room lasted about two hours.

Back home, we hunkered down waiting to see what the damages would be. When the bills arrived even Pridger was floored.

The first bill was from the radiologists who examined the images from the CAT scan – $1,259.00! The bill from the emergency room came to just shy of $3,000.00 (and this presumably includes the five or ten minute use of that incredibly expensive machine), for a total of $4,259.00! The prescribed pain medications cost something too, of course.

For this price, one doctor spent half an hour doing sutures. Probably one radiologist viewed the the CAT scan images for about five minutes. Perhaps two or three nurses or technicians had to alter their routine for about ten or twenty minutes each. A tetanus shot was administered. Some anesthesia, disinfectant, and paper towels were expended. And, of course, there were administrative costs. But the net, tangible, result was nine stitches to a broken upper lip.

There is no mercy connected to emergency medical care these days – or any medical care, for that matter. It's really, and strictly, a profit making business from first to last! Nine stitches and the assurance that no bones were broken comes up to an incredible $473.22 per stitch!!!!

We were there for about 120 minutes, of which about 80 were spent waiting. The whole 120 minute period calculates out to about $35.49 per minute. If we only count the 40 minutes Mrs. Pridger was being actively administered to, it figures out to about $106.48 per minute!

Now there's got to be something seriously wrong with this picture. Those costs go far beyond simply outrageous! Something is terribly wrong, and talk of universal health care isn't going to fix it. Mandating private health care insurance certainly isn't going to fix it – not if that simply means that the public is going to pay these kinds of outrageous costs.

The problem can't be solved by making health care insurance available, because the health insurance industry and the litigation industry, are a major parts of the problem, if not the actual core of the problem. Naturally, the government has to be part of the problem too.

John Q. Pridger

PAYING AMERICAN PRICES

One of the problems with health care in this country is that it is one consumer item where we still pay high American prices rather than "made in China" prices (though more and more of our pharmaceuticals and medical implements and supplies probably come from China and India).

Our health care system is still driven, at least to a great degree, by domestic free market economics. But, in itself, this is not the problem. The problem is, when we visit the doctor, hospital, or emergency room, we're paying for a lot more than just the health care we receive. We're paying for large profits, stock dividends, and the company payrolls, for a whole array of major corporations and industries that should not be part of the health care equation. But they have become an integral part of the "industry."

We're paying the costs of liability settlements, both realized and unrealized, in an overly litigious society where the medical industry has become a happy hunting ground. We're paying the wages of insurance company employees and executives, and a whole cadre of lawyers, every time we have a health care expense.

The high costs of a medical education, and increasingly costs of medical specialization in various medical fields are another major factor in health care costs. We don't have enough doctors, because a medical education is beyond the reach of most promising students.

We, or their respective governments, subsidize foreigners who come to study medicine in the United States, but Americans often have to go elsewhere to gain an education in medical fields. Of course, most students who aspire to be doctors simply opt for something else. We have many American technicians, but an increasing percentage of our doctors are from somewhere else, and these foreign imports (unlike our consumer goods on Wal-Mart shelves – not to mention Wal-Mart employees), demand American wages and profits.

The health care bill is padded beyond all rhyme and reason by what should not be allowed in a compassionate and civilized society. The "industry" is no longer about caring for people, nearly as much as caring for the "industry." It's a behemoth out of control, wed to major industries that should not be related to health care. And the profits and wages these industries have come to expect, are strictly "American" in nature.

John Q. Pridger

SPEAKING OF AMERICAN PRICES

Three dollar gas is just about what an American price for oil ought to be by now adjusting for inflation. Back about 1960, when most of our oil was domestically produced, gas was about $.30 a gallon, and we now have about a ten cent dollar in terms of the dollar's 1960 purchasing power.

This particular deduction is based on Pridger's working lifetime (PWL), and Pridger's leading economic indicators. But the official inflation adjustment figures cannot be too much different. In fact, the PWL may be a little behind the time.

The trouble with paying an American price for gas is not that it costs $3.00 a gallon – it's the fact that most of it has to be purchased from others elsewhere. And it was the production costs elsewhere that determined the price of oil and gas here. For a long time, as we shifted from American oil to foreign imports, we were not paying American market prices. Our crude oil prices were essentially based on Arab and other foreign petroleum production costs.

Inevitably, in an increasingly global economy, we became so dependent on foreign oil and those cheap prices. But, as we came to depend on them, those damned producers wised up and are now increasingly insisting on American style profits. How do you like that?

But, who can blame them? Why should those others elsewhere – those damned foreigners – subsidize the American economy by undercharging for their primary liquid assets?

THE FALLACY OF "BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP"

Why do we insist on getting things wrong? Today, everybody "knows" that children born in the United States, even of illegal immigrant parents, are automatically American citizens.

The issue has been brought up by anti-Obama forces to challenge his qualifications to become president.

McCain, born in the Canal Zone, has been similarly challenged, but obviously without valid grounds. He was a military child born of American military parents in the Canal Zone, which was then "American soil." McCain is an American Citizen by virtue of both his parentage and place of birth – either one of which is sufficient to convey American citizenship.

Naturally, the overwhelming consensus is that Obama was born in Hawaii, thus he is an American citizen by birth. But maybe they have something here. Some serious doubts can be raised in his unique case – not to mention the unproven allegation that he might have been born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.

If the American Indians, who were certainly born in this country, were not considered automatic citizens by the Constitution's framers, how can it be that the offspring of foreigners who arrive here become automatic citizens?

[Excerpt from speech delivered by Edward Erler, Hillsdale College, February 12, 2008]

Birthright citizenship – the policy whereby the children of illegal aliens born within the geographical limits of the United States are entitled to American citizenship – is a great magnet for illegal immigration. Many believe that this policy is an explicit command of the Constitution, consistent with the British common law system. But this is simply not true. (Read the whole article at: h ttp://issuesviews.blogspot.com)

John Q. Pridger

Thursday, 11 September, 2008

9/11 SEVEN YEARS OUT.

Are we better off today than on the eve of 9/11/2001? Not many would respond in the affirmative. And, what's worse, things are likely to get much worse. We've got two presidential candidates who are dedicated to "change," but the change they want to bring about is more of the same – ignoring the limits of American power – hoping to remake the world into something like Pridger's own dysfunctional (but still thriving and commercially developing), home town.

Obama talks a lot about change, and his very candidacy certainly looks like change. Now, with Governor Palin aboard, the McCain team looks like change too. And they, too, are talking about it. But both teams are New World Order teams, looking toward keeping the world on a leash and expanding the limits of American power.

Meanwhile Osama bin Laden is still at large and the War on Terror in Afghanistan isn't going all that well at all. Iraq seems to be the bright spot. Things are better there due to the "successful surge." But we're a long way from a graceful exit.

As Collin Powell said, "If we break it, we own it." We broke it, and now we own it – and there is nothing more difficult than divesting one's self of something one owns and which has come to define one's success.

SARAH PALIN'S TRIUMPH

Sarah Palin has faced some tough questions at the hands of veteran news commentator, Charles Gibson. She certainly showed that she could look him unblinkingly in the eye, frequently calling him "Charlie," and come out with firm responses to provocative questions – questions intentionally framed to cause her pause and put her on the defensive. Like a true fighter, she showed her metal, refusing to be intimidated or defensive.

She could hardly have done better. She not only showed the substance of her own grit, and her clear presence of mind, she showed that she is a team player. Gibson was unable to fluster or bum-fuzzle her on either the facts or the issues. He failed to trip her up, and couldn't get her to admit she's not ready to become "president" if that should happen sooner rather than much later. She's ready! (All our doubts aside, she seemed convinced of it, and seems admirably convincing.)

Her responses were all forceful, without any humming and hawing – and she stated quite categorically, with the very briefest hesitancy, that the United States should, and would, go to war with Russia over Georgia and other "westernizing" former Soviet Republics, if Russia doesn't buckle and act like a responsible team player.

Maybe she should think that one over just a little bit. Russia never has been a team player because they don't quite embrace all of our rules. Maybe it's time to reassess the potential limits to our military power, and admit that there are other powers in the world with legitimate defensive concerns and spheres of influence.

Speaking of the limits of power, here's a book that (at least from the reviews), backs up a lot of what Pridger tries to say in his own humble way. It's written by a retired military officer turned scholar – so he backs his views with more substantive sources than Pridger usually finds time to employ.

Pridger Hasn't read it yet, but it appears to be a must read.

The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich, points to our staggering lurch toward empire. And he takes us to task for our sense of entitlement – not only for our increasingly conspicuous consumption at home, but the notion that the world is somehow our baby.

Bacevich illuminates our gathering domestic dysfunction – our leaders having rushed us into a new kind of global war – one without exits or deadlines. He doesn't put all the blame on President Bush and his strategists, but points out how we are all ultimately culpable, with our increasingly unrestrained appetite for global resources – turning our military services from their rightful mission into more of an economic mission, and to train to world to serve us. The book digs at the roots of what some, including Pridger, have called American decadence. The author points out that not only has the president and Congress dropped the ball. We've dropped it collectively. (Based on a review by Publishers' Weekly)

Like Pridger (Quoting a review by Robert G. Kaiser, from The Washington Post):

"Bacevich argues that the government the Founders envisaged no longer exists, replaced by an imperial presidency and a passive, incompetent Congress. 'No one today seriously believes that the actions of the legislative branch are informed by a collective determination to promote the common good,' he writes. 'The chief . . . function of Congress is to ensure the reelection of its members.'

"Bacevich is a West Point graduate who served as an Army officer for more than 20 years, retiring as a colonel.... A Catholic and self-described conservative, he earned a PhD from Princeton and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the Boston University faculty in 1998 to teach history and international relations...

"...What was, even in the author's youth several decades ago, a thrifty society whose exports far outdistanced its imports has become a nation of debtors by every measure. Consumption has become the great American preoccupation, and consumption of imported oil the great chink in our national armor. When on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States suffered the most serious attack on its soil since 1812, our government responded by cutting taxes and urging citizens onward to more consumption. Bacevich quotes President Bush: 'I encourage you all to go shopping more.'

"In Bacevich's view, the modern American government is dominated by an "ideology of national security" that perverts the Constitution and common sense...

"Today politicians of all persuasions embrace this ideology. Bacevich quotes Sen. Barack Obama echoing 'the Washington consensus' in a campaign speech that defined America's purposes 'in cosmic terms' by endorsing a U.S. commitment to 'the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders' regardless of the circumstances.

"...He calls the all-volunteer Army, isolated from the society it is supposed to protect, "an imperial constabulary" that "has become an extension of the imperial presidency."

"...War is not the answer to the challenges we face, he says, and 'to persist in following that path is to invite inevitable overextension, bankruptcy and ruin.'

"...Bacevich is no globalist, and he treats trade as a sign of national weakness. One could provide a long list of objections of this kind, but quibbles cannot undermine Bacevich's big argument, which is elegant and powerful.

"...If we cannot get our goals and our means into balance soon, our future will be a lot less fun than our past.

"...For many years our leaders have failed... The price of their failure has been high and could go much higher...

(Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.)

Pridger thinks he's found another fellow traveler. TOO MUCH trade IS a national weakness! Americans already rue the day we become dependent on foreign oil. And we'll rue the day that we became dependent on China and Mexico (and a dozen or more other developing nations), for just about everything we hold dear on Wal-Mart shelved – not to mention the credit required to buy the stuff and fight our wars with.

John Q. Pridger

WE'RE STILL HERE – FOR THE TIME BEING

The Hadron Collider has apparently successfully gone on line as planned – and we're still here. Had it really simulated the "Big" Bang, the event might have been even bigger than the original 9/11/2001 spectacle, or possibly even Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

Those are foolish concerns, of course. Reputable scientists would never intentionally do anything potentially hazardous to our health or threatening to the planet. After all, they're the ones who discovered that we need warning labels on tobacco products and shouldn't breath the air, eat the food, or drink the water.

On the other hand, if they have succeeded in making a lot of tiny little black holes, the "event" may not be over, but only beginning in a modest way. It's conceivable that our present worries over the ozone layer and global warning could be upstaged by an unstoppable "infection." Just another thing to think about. But never fear – it could be years before the microscopic black holes mature into anything recognizably threatening.

In the mean time we're still over-fed, and we've got computers, TV, and video games galore – not to mention porn and Viagra – with which to occupy our minds and time. We have economic crises to watch and worry about. And we've got wars and threats of war to pay attention to – not to mention the matter of electing the proper executive team to best manage and administer them.

John Q. Pridger

Monday, 8 September, 2008

NEW SUPER COLLIDER COMING ON LINE

Simulating the Big Bang, and thereby proving the "theory," is supposedly the purpose of the new $9.2 billion Hadron Collider project ongoing somewhere around Geneva. The Hadron Collider is the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – at least since the original Big Bang.

Apparently the international scientific team conducting this experiment are so skeptical of their success that they are betting their lives, and the world on it. Let us pray that the "Big Bang" experiment fails to produce anything but a very small one.

Somehow scientists are confident the Big Bang theory is perfectly valid, and that replicating it on a very small scale is perfectly safe.

Cosmologists tell us that an object about the size of one thin dime exploded about 13.7 billion years ago and resulted in the Universe we're acquainted with today – the stars, planets, and after a long, intense era of turmoil, life on earth.

This caused Pridger to take an interested in pre-Universal history. Pridger had a lot of questions – such as: What were the properties of that little dime-sized object? What did God make it out of, and where did he keep it? Did He have space to suspend it in, or was space also a by-product of the Big Bang? Whatever the case, how long did it take him to figure out how to blow it up? Did He have to invent a super-collider in order to do it? Was the explosion even part of the plan? And, of course, had He performed anything like that before, or was it His first experiment?

The answers to those questions, and many more, will have to await other posts. Hopefully, the answers will not be lost due to the experiment producing larger "simulated" Big Bangs than expected.

They're hoping to create microscopic bangs and black holes. (Don't those black holes gobble things up? Pridger's fear is that the black holes will suck up all the little bangs and they'll all coalesce into one nasty infection or super-bug for which there is not yet a vaccination.)

Let's see, if a dime-sized object could produce the known and unknown Universe, a very small, sub-atomic, particle may only be big enough to produce – say a small star cluster. Pridger hopes they have some very small fragments of sub-sub-atomic particles to experiment with for starters. Even that might blow the lid off of the multi-billion dollar Hedron Collider and discourage any further experimentation – at least until another collection is taken up.

But there is hope that man will fail in in his attempt to simulate the Big Bang. God probably used a very special substance to fashion the "original object," and, fortunately, he's kept it a secret. It probably isn't even revealed in Biblical Code – at least Pridger hasn't been able to decipher any such thing yet. Fortunately, Genesis started with Day One rather than the day before.

Day Zero of Creation (the era of pre-creationism and pre-Universal history), defies literary treatment – or at least makes it terribly difficult. There was nothing there except God, until He made the "original object" (or the substance and tools he needed to make it with) – and, since there was no time, and possibly no space, we're ill equipped to tell or understand the story. Not even Pridger knows it all. To be perfectly truthful, he's still stumped as to whether there was, or was not, any space. So all of Pridger's work on the subject is based on the presumption that there was space in which God maneuvered (albeit, without time), and set off the Big Bang (which, to Him, of course, was just a little snap – like a kernel of popcorn popping).

Still, for all our failings, scientific man is getting more godlike with every passing year. He may figure out how to replicate the Big Bang yet, and create a whole new Universe.

Then there will be no need for Pridger's "Pre-Universal History." It would only be of interest in this particular Universe.

John Q. Pridger

Sunday, 7 September, 2008

IMAGES OF THE CANDIDATES

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagery is powerful, though we've all learned not to believe everything we see. We know how images can be doctored. But here's one that recently found its way into Pridger's email inbox, with two images that probably were not doctored. On the left, of course, is Barack Obama, the Messianic symbol of multi-culturalism and "change" – and on the right is John McCain the fighter pilot.

Naturally Obama looks a little alien to most of us in this particular shot, and that's probably unfair. Maybe he only appeared in this Moslem garb once or twice in his life. Perhaps this photo was taken on a trip to visit relatives in Kenya. But it nonetheless points to the fact that Obama is a new kind of presidential candidate, and that America is not quite what it once was. Obama admits he will be quite a change from what we're used to, and his platform is all about change.

Quite frankly (though he likes Obama for his many qualities), it's difficult for Pridger to imagine this as a man who might become the very next president of the United States.

Of course, these images may not only be unfair, but totally misleading. The photo of Obama shows him as he perhaps once saw himself, or may sometimes see himself, in terms of one side of his unique heritage. It shows only part of his persona – and a mere facet of his multicultural identity. McCain no longer wears a uniform either, and his appearance has changed somewhat as well.

The picture of McCain shows him as he once was early in his life – and, though he has matured and grown considerably older, he still bills himself as a fighter.

Obama considers himself a fighter too, of course – and he has shown it on the campaign trail. But one can hardly image an American presidential election in which the man on the left would be the Democratic Party's great hope. For better or worse, such is the power of imagery, and such are the changes we have already experienced as a nation.

Photos are superficial at best. What really matters, is what's inside our two presidential contenders. Unfortunately, we won't really be able to discover that until one or the other of the above men has been seated as president for some time. We have only rhetoric, appearances, advertisements, and personal history to go by. McCain, having a much longer track record, has the advantage over Obama in the latter.

McCain has a troubling hang-up – in that he seems determined not to loose the war in Iraq as we lost in Vietnam. He believes we are winning in Iraq, yet nobody has been able to paint a convincing picture of what "victory" and its long term aftermath might look like.

If we win and get out of Iraq, it isn't going to be the American style democracy we envisioned. It's still going to be Iraq, and a much more unpredictable one than before we went in and tried to do a radical makeover. In fact, "radical" might define what Iraq will ultimately become after we've declared victory and moved the troops out.

John Q. Pridger

MAYBE THE SPELLING CHECKER KNOWS?

A little Trivial Pursuit here. In the course of Pridger's email correspondence, he has noticed something interesting with regard to his spelling checker's suggested words for unlisted names.

When Obama's name comes up, the spelling checker suggests "Abeam," as in, perhaps, "a beam of light."
When McCain's name comes up, the checker suggests "Moccasin," as in "water moccasin – a deadly snake."

Now what could that darned spell checker know that we don't know? Incidentally, Pridger still uses Netscape 7.0 (circa 2000), for email, so it's dictionary cannot have been compiled or updated with the present presidential election in mind.

John Q. Pridger

Thursday, 4 September, 2008

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES!

The mass media and a day at a convention can work wonders. Just yesterday the media was having a frenzy over Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter, Troopergate, and her lack of experience. There was a lot of doubt and hand-wringing about McCain's choice for VP even among Republicans. With her speech at the Republican National Convention last night, however, the media is painting a whole new picture. She passed muster – with flying colors, and with a single speech. Amazing!

Palin enthralled the convention and the media is now saying she brings to the Republicans the wit and charm of the Democratic presidential candidate, plus all the attributes the religious right and old fashioned conservatives hold dear – just what the doctor called for, and what the McCain campaign needed! There's even "change" in the Republican atmosphere – with the feeling that the McCain-Palin team could now potentially represent more change than the Obama-Bidden team. Apparently McCain has shed his RINO identity clean as a whistle.

Tomorrow will be another day, of course. The Democrats aren't done yet, and we still have two months to watch the antics of the media-driven two ring circus that presidential politics has become.

But the "Palin Effect" has taken on new meaning for the time being. As Pridger has noted before, the media will make the decision which party candidates will come out looking best in the end. But what Palin has done is to even up the two tickets and given the media more positive traction to pump up the Republican side, in the event the "establishment" decides to make McCain the final "anointed one."

At this stage, there's only one thing that remains fairly certain. That is that it is going to be a close and interesting race. McCain perhaps has a better chance than before, but he hasn't got the election locked up. Regardless of who wins, however, he will likely provide us with a continuation of Empire, New World Order, and the continuation, if not expansion, of war.

John Q. Pridger

HILLARY AND BILL MUST BE APPALLED

Hillary and Bill must be in a state of dismayed shock over the Sarah Palin VP choice. If McCain wins, and doesn't make it through his term in office, Sarah Palin is in line to become the first woman president! And, if McCain makes it through, and the administration proves to be a popular one, Palin is still in line to become the first female president.

Let us hope that all the stories about the "Clinton Body Count," and the phenomenon known as "Arkancide," are merely fabrications and fantasies of conspiratorial minds – or, at least, that we're not still counting.

John Q. Pridger

WAR PRESIDENTS

When it comes to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, heaven forbid, Iran and Russia), McCain is probably the best bet. If we've got to be at war, it's probably better to have a bona fide warrior as Commander-in-Chief.

Obama is not an anti-war president just because he wants to get us out of Iraq and says he would negotiate with Iran. He's listening to Israel just as John McCain is, and he is for getting more involved in Afghanistan in order to catch bin Laden and win the War on Terror (Rooting our a rag-tag bunch of mal-contents with the world's greatest military machine, where collateral damage, in the form of innocent civilians killed, is always much greater than terrorists killed.)

Remember never, ever, attend an Islamic wedding in any of the tribal areas if you happen to find yourself in Afghanistan!

So Obama cannot avoid being a war president. He will not only inherit the wars we're already involved in, but will have a tough time dealing with the military industrial complex and the entrenched Washington bureaus, and the think tanks that formulate foreign relations and war policy. Obama, in short, is an establishment candidate who will do nothing to change what really needs to be changed.

We've essentially accomplished Israel's purpose in Iraq. It's now a weak and splintered nation, at odds with itself, with a long road to go in patching itself up and making itself whole again. Chances are good that the process will take generations.

The important thing to Israel is that Iraq is no longer a major military threat at this time. Of course, they favor a continued American military presence in Iraq as both an insurance policy, and base for further pacification of the Islamic Middle East – including Iran.

Both McCain and Obama want to get tough on Iran on behalf of Israel. But Obama seems to overlook the fact that we need Iraq as our forward military base in the event of a war with Iran. And that means we need a more or less passive Iraq under our effective control. As Commander-in-Chief, Obama will certainly become aware of the fact that to depart Iraq completely would be to limit our options with regard to Iran and other Islamic states.

Ironically, in spite of ourselves, we have brought Iraq closer to Iran. It seems the Iraqi government that we set up is looking toward Iran as an ally in a post-war era than to the United States. And Iran may step in to help Iraq reinvent itself once we're gone.

So, we're in sort of in a double Catch-22 situation in this regard. We want to get out of Iraq somehow, but we certainly don't want Iran to take over as Iraq's main ally. Yet, cannot afford to have large numbers of troops "tied down" in Iraq keeping order between Iraq factions if we want to devote energy against Iran. We need a secure base in Iraq, with a more or less stable and supportive (puppet), government. In spite of our "successes" with the surge, it looks like we just can't get there from here.

We're clearly in a difficult situation if we hanker to be in a position to attack Iran. So, in Pridger's opinion, Obama isn't likely to get American troops out of Iraq any sooner than John McCain.

Expanding the war in Afghanistan isn't such a good idea either. It can end up being even more of a quagmire than Iraq. Ask the Russians about Afghanistan. Our supply lines are multiple times longer than theirs were – and there are no Afghanistan sea ports. We have to depend on the good will of Pakistan, where we are almost universally hated and distrusted by the people, if not the government. And we have been working to establish bases in former Soviet Republics to the north.

Our goal in Afghanistan is to get bin Laden. If we get him, what then? Do we stay to insure a "free and democratic" Afghanistan, as we want to do in Iraq? Dream on in both cases.

And what about Russia? Russia is still a big player, and potentially a heavy hitter. And now that we're beginning to get under Russia's skin, there's no guarantee that we will not have to fight Russia just to fulfill our dream of a free and democratic Middle East.

It would be ironic if Russia ends up supporting Afghanistan freedom fighters against the United States. That could happen. If we continue to push for Georgia, and other former Soviet Republics, to become members of NATO, and try to bully and intimidate the Bear, Russia is almost certain to become very unfriendly again. It's already happening. If we decide to attack Iran, with Russia at its back, the going could get very tough.

American leaders might be able to contemplate another Cold War, or ever another world war "over there," but Europe is not very likely to be enthusiastic about it. At some point we might loose our cleavage with our staunchest Old World allies, not to mention the new ones that once were (and may be again, because of our good intentions), wed to Russia (i.e., the former Soviet Union).

Obama has not talked about fundamentally changing our foreign policy or extracting us from our multitudes of foreign entanglements (save Iraq), so he is as likely as McCain to become the next great "major" war president. Obama is not the man to lead us into war. If somebody has to lead us into war, let it be a warrior.

But, since McCain knows what war really is, he is perhaps less likely to lead us into a major war than Obama.

But the choices are not with the next president. Both candidates are establishment candidates – and that means they will march to the orders of the secret movers and shakers behind the throne.

Another thing is certain. Presidents often become different people once they have gained office. So, in spite of all the campaign rhetoric, a President Obama could become "the war president" once in office, and a president McCain could possibly become the president less likely to take us into a bigger war. Sounds very unlikely, of course – especially since it turns out Palin is apparently a Christian-Zionist – but but Pridger wouldn't bet to the contrary.

John Q. Pridger

Wednesday, 3 September, 2008

THE PAIN AND THE PALIN EFFECT

Unfortunately for John McCain, the seventeen year old daughter of his vice presidential choice is pregnant and unmarried. Just what this has to do with presidential politics is not all that clear, but it has nevertheless evolved into an embarrassment, though intense media coverage, and thrown a cloud over his choice for VP.

At best, we're all gritting our teeth and asking, "Now why did that young lady have to go out and get pregnant at such an inopportune moment in her mother's career?" She may very well have cost McCain the presidency, and her mother the vice presidency.

It's not as if it was his running mate was found to be carrying a child from an illicit extramarital affair, but the Democrats are nonetheless on the attack, and many Republicans continue to scratch their heads and lament, "What WAS McCain thinking?"

Though he finds Sarah Palin very appealing, Pridger is wondering too. It's almost as if the Republican team is now some sort of an attempt at political humor. The media can do this! McCain has a hell of a great sense of humor, but maybe his choice was not all that wise after all. He claims he was aware of the situation before he made his choice, and didn't think it was relevant.

A sample of McCain humor – speaking tough on Russia's incursion into Georgia: "In the 21st century, nation's don't invade other nations." Ha, ha, ha! That was a good one! As Pat Buchanan said, "Even Dick Cheney must have guffawed."

How could it be that McCain thought a pregnant daughter wasn't relevant? It is to the Democrats. McCain didn't put Mrs. Palin's daughter on the ticket, but didn't he realize what a field day the Democrats would have with this? Move over "Troopergate!" And Troopergate was already casting a heavy enough cloud over his VP choice.

Mrs. Palin's children were very much front and center when she came on stage – including the beautiful, unwed, and very pregnant, daughter.

Was it all that important to have a woman running mate? (Wouldn't it be better to have an old-guard political veteran with a pregnant unmarried daughter?) And, if so, was it wise to select one who would obviously invite such widespread skepticism as a good looking soccer mom who is also a gun wielding, moose killing, governor of the nation's largest state?

This is what presidential politics has come to, and this is a demonstration of how the issues at hand can take a back seat to what rational politics ought to be. This is what popular democracy brings to politics, and shows why the founders favored and established a Republic rather than a democracy.

Okay, so Pridger is an admitted male chauvinist warthog, who doesn't really believe the time should ever have come when women gained the voting franchise, or taken to politics rather than home homemaking and child rearing. But at this stage, with regard to the Republican presidential ticket, Pridger's all for Sarah Palin. In fact, if she were only capable of choosing another running mate (such as Ron Paul), Pridger would like the ticket even better.

But Pridger, like many others, likes Palin on a rather superficial level. We do not yet know where she stands on the broader national issues. She is suspect, of course, for she was snatched from nowhere by McCain and the establishment. And she must have been snatched up for a reason. Pridger fears, and already suspects, she will turn out to be a compliant Christian-Zionist.

Yup! Just as Pridger figured. Mrs. Palin is said to display an Israeli flag in her office. This must be one of the reasons she was chosen. So much for her "Buchanan conservative" credentials.

John Q. Pridger

OUR ROLE IN THE WORLD

McCain may be a great man, but Pridger sees him as an American Empire, and New World Order man, when what we need is someone who will work toward reestablishing the American Constitutional Republic, and divest us of the notion that we have inherited a latter day "white man's burden" (however, multi-cultural and diverse the mission may now be decked out).

We've got a role to play in the world, of course, but "running it" and "policing it," is not it. As Pridger has said many times before, the best possible thing we could do for the world would be to leave everybody else alone and get our own house in order. Since it is still the biggest house on the block, fixing it up would help improve the entire neighborhood. Only when our own house is in order, and our yard cleaned up, can we presume to be an enlightened example to other householders.

We cannot bring freedom, liberty, and justice, to all of the people of the world by economic and political coercion, nor by force of arms. We need to concentrate on freedom, liberty, and justice "for all" right here in the United States – and thereby let the world know just what our institutions can do, and what it might do for them as well, within the framework of their own cultures.

"American culture" today is not something we should be pawning off or forcing on the rest of the world. More than anything else, we have a culture of grossly conspicuous consumption and mega-waste. If we think we can make the rest of the world just as conspicuously consumptive, wasteful, and overweight as we are, we haven't been paying attention to the law of diminishing returns, declining global recourses, environmental degradation, increasing populations, and our own mushrooming debts, dependencies, and economic and strategic weaknesses.

It did absolutely nothing for us or the global environment to export our dirty production industries to places like China – so we could consume more at cheaper prices. It may have helped China develop an industrialized economy, of course, so it could become the next great superpower and our prime supplier of consumer goods and credit. But it didn't help us, and will ultimately cost us many times more than anybody has bothered to calculate.

Our job should have been to figure out how to keep our own productive capacity, and economic independence, and make our industries more environmentally friendly and less natural resource greedy. In short, we should have learned not only to live by our own means, but well (and sustainably), within those means – showing the rest of the world how it could and should be done.

What we have actually done is insured that developing countries will make even worse mistakes than we have by trying to develop, and overdevelop, at breakneck speed – insuring more rapid global resource depletion and environmental degradation. And, while we were doing this, we also undermined our own nation's independence and our national security position.

John Q. Pridger

SPEAKING OF RON PAUL...

Apparently the media forgot to cover the parallel rally Ron Paul supporters held while the Republican convention was going on. Paul's Campaign for Liberty, and "Rally for the Republic," was held August 31st through September 2nd. It was apparently a great success, with ten or fifteen thousand attendees, but the viewing American public would never know it. The media is vigorously keeping alternative ideas out of the presidential contest. See:

Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty – Rally for The Republic

THE BAD SHAPE THE NATION IS IN...

Pridger caught an astute observation by an ear ring wearing Black comedian who appeared on Larry King Live last night. Pridger missed the name, but he aptly observed...

"Things have become so bad in this country, that we're going to vote for the Black guy."

They guy has a sense of humor, and maybe some sense too. Jesse Ventura appeared on the same program, and had attended the Ron Paul rally as the keynote speaker. But Larry seemed to have absolutely no interest in that.

John Q. Pridger

CHANGE

WE'VE ALREADY HAD CHANGE, AND A LOT OF IT, AND LOOK WHERE WE ARE. It seems a lot of people think we would be moving in the right direction if we could only elect either a woman or a Black president, to prove, once and for all, that we are no longer the nation we once were. Once we were a highly respected nation among nations – one that cleaved to the moral high ground. That's history.

Of course, white men have been pretty much responsible for everything that's happened so far – including extending the voting franchise to women, minorities, and enlightened eighteen year-olds. A lot of things got a lot better under white man rule – at least as far as women, minorities, and children are concerned. But we'd like to change all that, even more – forever.

But now, things couldn't be much worse – yet, it's bound to get worse before it gets better. So we really need some change. But we need positive change. The change that Barack stands for sounds rather expensive. He's a social Utopian. But what we need is somebody who still believes in Republican government – limited, at least somewhat, by what is still supposed to be the Law of the Land, the Constitution

We need to change back to what we were supposed to be in the first place, and reinvigorate the enlightened visions of our founders – without all the inherited baggage and social defects that had cause us to fall short of the mark during the period of our greatest development.

John Q. Pridger

WHAT PRIDGER'S CRUSADE IS ALL ABOUT

The Crash of Western Capitalist Civilization?

Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty – Rally for The Republic