|
|
PRIDGER |
|
E-Mail |
John Q. Pridger's
|
|
|
PRIDGER |
|
E-Mail |
John Q. Pridger's
|
|
Pridger's Web Host BLOG SEP.
2008 JUL-DEC.
2007 DEC.
2006 |
Wednesday, 29 October, 2008 SPREADING THE WEALTH Both major candidates speak of spreading the wealth, but neither one has a good, constitutional idea about about how it should be done. Both tend to think the key to spreading the wealth is through the income tax code. Obama would tax and spend more to spread taxpayers' money to the have nots (tax the rich and give to the poor), and McCain would collect less from businesses in hopes of generating jobs which would spread the wealth (the Reagan Trickle Down theory). Both candidates have a hand on the elephant. One on the trunk and the other on the tail. But neither one has seen the elephant. The only viable way to "justly" spread the wealth in a free market system is to have a truly egalitarian economic system, where the great majority of "workers" are gainfully employed in either wealth creation – actual production – or "productive and necessary" services. In a richly endowed nation such as ours, this would mean broad-based distribution of land and capital, with a large agrarian sector comprised of family farms, with all the associated supporting manufacturing, transportation, processing industries and marketing services to support it. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of commercial activities would be in the hands of individual proprietors near the source of wealth creation, valued added processing, wholesale and retail marketing. This, essentially describes a "distributionist" economic system. And this distributionism is the natural key to broad based wealth distribution in a viable national economy. Essentially, most economic activity should be local, and the combined and interconnected local economies comprise the parts that make up regional, state, and national economy. In a modern industrialized nation, of course, big capital would have a major role – and its role would be to serve the entire nation, as appropriate, on a local, regional, or national basis, according to state of the arts industrial needs. This would provide the various manufacturing needs of the nation at the macro level. But these large industrial enterprises should never be allowed to become over-large or monopolistic in nature and scope of operation. The function of the industrial sector should also be distributionist in nature, but utilizing the appropriately large corporate organizations required to accomplish their role of providing for the national economic needs. The service sectors of any economy naturally flow from the needs of the various productive sectors, plus the the many useful "service" spin-offs that tend to multiply in any prosperous economy. The key to wealth distribution is that as many people able to work are employed or self-employed as possible, and able to earn more than just a living wage. This means that farmers get a fair price for their production, merchants get a fair profit, and labor at all levels get a fair wage. Unfortunately, our major presidential candidates no longer see economics in this way. Government has tended to favor monopolistic financial and industrial capital in an effort to deliver the mega seamless solution – and they have striven to make it a global seamless solution – corporate mega-solutions for all things. And the system our leaders have been vigorously building is coming unglued – with the mega downside implications that should have been obvious from the beginning. Corporate capitalism is no replacement for individual free enterprise and grass roots free market economics – it should only be auxiliary thereto with the purpose of "serving," and administrating to, a sound economy firmly rooted at ground level. Government has a major role in formulating the sort of regulation that reign in predatory capital and turn it toward the public good, and maximizing the freedom and liberty of the people to be productive by all means at their disposal. Government also has many legitimate "public service roles" too, of course. There are some things that only government can do. One of the most fundamental is the provision of an honest circulating currency to serve the needs of commerce and the everyday exchange needs of the people. But our government has forsaken the people in this most fundamental of roles, having turned the money creation franchise over to private banking interests and the financial capital institutions that have grown up around their profit centers. This failure on the part of government has led directly to our current and continuing financial melt-down and mushrooming of the public debt. Obama seems to be getting some things right, in speaking of "trickle up" rather than "trickle down." This appears to recognize the ancient truism that "all wealth comes from the soil." On the other hand, McCain is right in saying that taxing the rich, as Obama proposes (interpreted as taxing businesses) in order to re-distribute wealth, tends to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But giving financial and industrial capital too much leeway to "hoard the golden eggs" for themselves is destructive to the idea of a broad-based prosperity that could very well be if only this hoarding could be prevented. Trickle-down economic theory has this major flaw. The big boys have such big pockets (and so many of them), that they can, and do, fill them to amazing proportions before allowing anything to trickle down. In fact, they see it as their "duty" to themselves and their stockholders to prevent as much trickle as possible from reaching workers. And (given license by the government itself), they have gone the extra mile (thousands of miles, in fact), to make the trickle accrue to poorly paid foreign workers rather than American workers. Government has not only given "capital" license to sell American labor out, but generous taxpayer subsidies to do so! This will almost certainly go down as the crime of the century before our economic problems are solved. If they are ever solved, that is. Why can't both of our presidential candidates focus on the whole elephant? On big problem is that it isn't an elephant. It's a million times bigger and nobody seems to be able to get a focus on it. We need government policies that encourage both grass roots free enterprise, and ground level job creation and wealth production, as well as a favorable environment for large and small businesses and industries to create more good paying jobs – most importantly, productive, wealth creating, jobs. Some of this can be done through tax policy, of course. But first and foremost we have to figure out what we want our national economy to look like. To do that, we've got to re-discover what "national economy" means, and abandon all of our misbegotten attempts to build a "global economy" on the backs of American consumers and taxpayers. First off, we've got to realize that the government should be constrained by the Constitution to very limited roles – essentially the roles granted to it by the Constitution itself. Re-distribution of the wealth of "workers" is not one of them. Our Constitution clearly provides a mandate to accomplish the goals of the Declaration of Independence. That is, to provide a national environment conductive to the "pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for the American people. It can only accomplish this by exercising its Constitutional powers within the "confines" of our own nation and nowhere else. First and foremost, we must re-discover the concept to national independence (political as well as economic), individual freedom and liberty, and justice for all. And we have to reclaim the array of natural national advantages that accrued to us within the context of the nation-state system. "Productive labor" should never be taxed so its "wealth" can be re-distributed. If there is wealth to be re-distributed through tax policy, it would be the wealth which has accrued to the non-productive "super-rich," whose wealth is largely the result of manipulative and misbegotten gain. There's a world of difference between the "productive rich" and the "non-productive super-rich" – and the distinction between "earned income" and "unearned income" clearly recognized. This is to distinguish between (1) the "worker" component, and (2) the productive capital component, which are the wealth creation components of any economy. And these should be favored over (3) the purely parasitical components. Government should favor the wealth creators over the parasitical and speculative segments that generally amass riches but serve no constructive purpose. The latter need regulation and control to prevent excessive disparities in the wealth distribution to develop. Enlightened regulation and tax policy should be used to limit excess wealth accumulation by the unproductive. Only those who have "too much" or "way too much" should be subjected to taxation at all. The working man should never be taxed on his income, for taxing labor is to make the laborer that much a slave – to the percentage extent of the tax. Definitions are important. We must carefully define our terms. How could we define a "working man" or at what point a working man is too rich to be considered a "worker" who should not be taxed on his income? Arbitrary definitions are unavoidable, for all things come in various shades and colors. For income tax purposes, "worker" could simply be defined as any employed or self-employed person earning less than the national average of what would be necessary to permit a "decent" standard of living for an individual – in terms of average housing and food costs, ordinary consumer and transportation needs, plus an additional 10% for savings. Say that could be calculated to be $40,000.00 per year on the basis of national averages. For families with children, this amount would be increased (times the number of dependent children), by a calculated national average of the actual costs of supporting a child for a year, plus a factor for college savings. Thus the first $40,000.00 (plus child support costs) would be considered "earned income" (the value of his labor) and not taxable – and anything over that amount, from whatever source, would be considered taxable "unearned income." Married couples would be counted as individuals whether there are one or two breadwinners. Thus labor would not be taxed at all on this amount of earned income. Unearned income should be taxed on a progressive scale, to prevent "individuals" from amassing huge personal fortunes out of all proportion to both their "productive" role or any conceivable "human needs." For example, we have seen the specter of corporate CEOs claiming to "earn" salaries and bonuses of millions of dollars a year – often by "delivering value" to their companies by cutting the jobs of workers. The money they claim to earn, is excessive (much more than they need to be considered "rich"), and only possible because they have deprived workers of their just wages. The graduated income tax makes sense only in the context of controlling the predatory element, and cumulative injustices, of "excessive" wealth accumulation by individuals. There should be four major tax categories for the (1) the well off, (taxed at maybe 10% of their unearned income); (2) the rich (taxed 25% on their unearned income); (3) the very rich (taxed 50% on unearned income); and (4) the super-rich (taxed at 75% of unearned income.
There's more truth in the above email than meets the eye. Errant Government policy, on multiple levels, have extinguished the light at the end of several tunnels. The government hasn't willfully turned them off, it's merely fouled the wiring and made such a mess of things that nothing really works any more. The whole train is nonetheless still in the tunnel, barreling away at maximum speed, with no end in sight, no brakes, and no reverse. There's no real light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq or Afghanistan. The economic tunnel looks deeper and darker all the time. And the only two candidates up for the job of engineer are politicians rather than engineers. John Q. Pridger Monday, 27 October, 2008 BARACK OBAMA – MESSIAH OR ANTI-CHRIST? Funny how "Barack" actually supposedly means "The One" or the "The Savior" in Swahili. He has pointed this out himself. His popularity indicates that a lot of people believe it. And his rallies draw crowds as if his followers believe it. His rallies and paid advertising actually reflect and project this Messianic image – and he is mysteriously able to outspend his opponent four to one to get maximum favorable media exposure. On the other hand, there are others who believe he must be the AntiChrist. His middle name would appear to be a clear warning. It's a little difficult to imagine that the Second Coming of Christ would become manifest in something as worldly and as inherently corrupt as a major political campaign. And as nice a guy as Barack is, it seems pretty chancy to elect a president who has blatantly hobnobbed with such illustrious figures as William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But who is he, really – this Obama? The circumstances of his
birth were very unusual, as were his upbringing, and paternal heritage.
Additionally, he's the product of the political machinery of Chicago, which
(besides ordinary political corruption), now has the distinction of being the
murder capital of the nation. He chose to identify with his black, rather than
his white, heritage, and chose a very peculiar brand of church for one aspiring
to become president. Not that any of this should reflect on Obama's personal
character, but he's certainly a peculiar personage to have on the verge of
becoming president. Nobody wants that. Better play it safe and elect the Christ, Anti-Christ, or pretender. He's a very appealing character. Where do we get such candidates? Always, damned if you do and damned if you don't choices – the lesser of two mega-evils? If Pridger was forced to vote one of the major candidates, he would vote for McCain, just for old time sake, since (for all his obvious defects and loyalty to corporate and foreign powers), the only real choice is between white or black, and Pridger happens to be white. A McCain presidency is not going to be four more years of George Bush, no matter how much of a war monger him may be. We've already met up with reality, and four more years of a Bush-like administration is totally out of the question. It's not that Pridger is totally against a black president. It's that he's against one that seems so alien – and alien to everything this nation stood for prior to about 1960. And it's not that Pridger is totally against a white president with glaring flaws. It's that the one up to bat seems to be only slightly less inspiring that Bob Dole – who (before finally disappearing from public view), found his niche for a brief period as a TV Viagra pitchman. That was a role more suited to the Democratic opposition, though Bill Clinton probably didn't need Viagra. In any case, it's going to be another illustration of the classic old story of democracy and the universal voting franchise. Smart votes will be cancelled two to one by the dumb votes. (And sometimes the smart ones are dumber than the dumb ones.) The youth vote will cancel out the votes of the wise men. The male vote will be cancelled by the female vote. The White vote will be cancelled by the black vote combined with most of the liberal vote. The peace vote will be cancelled by the war vote. The conservative vote will be cancelled by the "I want mine" vote. Pridger figures the election will produce another mistake – it's unavoidable – and doesn't want to be a party to it. And it really doesn't matter which candidate is called upon to work the wonders. Pridger is a poor gambler. If he voted for John McCain, and McCain won, Obama would turn out to be the Christ and McCain the Anti-Christ. If he voted for Obama, and Obama won, we'd find out very quickly that Obama is actually the Anti-Christ. Of course, in spite of the fact that the media has studiously avoided acknowledging the fact, there are still other candidates up for election. Several of them. ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN – who are those other candidates, and what is their plan for saving the economy and getting us out of our war quagmires? Why don't you give the nation a break? As far as our major media is concerned, it's of no interest who else is running. There are others we can vote for:
You may even find those on the ballot. But there's more...
A vote for any of these is a vote against Obama/McCain "Change." There are white, black, and Hispanic choices here too. And most of them stand for more change than either Obama or McCain ever thought of. There appears to be no Communist or Fascist candidates – at least under those names – but there's plenty of them represented both in the major and third party candidates. John Q. Pridger Friday, 24 October, 2008 WEIRD TIMES In the midst of a global economic melt down, gold and silver are down, and all of a sudden the dollar is up. What's going on? We've been living in weird times for the last 37 years – since Nixon realized the gold window had to be closed (circa 1971). Really, you could say we have been in weird times, in monetary terms, for the last 95 years – since the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, and we began our wholesale foray into "debt-based" bank note currency. The former Federal Reserve Chairman, Allen Greenspan, did say we are experiencing a "hundred year economic tsunami." Tsunamis often wipe the entire resort from the beach, and this looks like the "big one." The dollar tumbled until the Europeans found out their own houses of cards were just as vulnerable as ours, and some of them more so. They're no longer as smug as they were only weeks ago. Most of our Asian co-New World Order partners are in deep trouble too, of course. So, ironically, now the dollar looks good compared to most other major currencies. After all, they are all about the same thing, and, for better or worse, are bottomed to a great degree on U.S. Treasury securities and the Federal Reserve dollar. So gas prices are looking relatively reasonable again, and gold is down. But the fact that gold is down is somewhat perplexing. Traditionally, gold and silver skyrocket in such troubled times. But out present time is so troubled that truly bizarre things are happening. For one thing, so many big investors are in such serious trouble – the ones who would ordinarily be rushing to gold – that they are being forced to unload their good assets, such as gold, in order to get out from under their leveraged market positions. Margin calls are killing millions of small traders and a lot of the big boys too, this time around. The toppling of so many major banks and financial institutions is without precedent in modern financial history. Nothing like this happened prior to the 1929 stock market crash. Most of the big banks, including some that have now bitten the dust, survived the 1929 crash and the Great Depression. Because of the gold standard, financial institutions had to be very careful about their accounting practices in that earlier era. Even Federal Reserve Money was convertible to gold on demand. When money was masquerading as "good as gold" public faith in the dollar had to be maintained at all costs. So the Great Depression followed and deepened because of a great lack of liquidity in the broader economy. In 1929, when billions of dollars disappeared into the memory hole, they were allowed to stay there. Billions simply disappeared. The Fed and other big banks let the small fry banks fail, and money was systematically removed from circulation as they did – because there had been far too much money in circulation in relation to the gold stocks that backed it. Even with the "New Deal" Franklin D. Roosevelt had trouble priming the economic pump because of the fear of incurring gold-based debt. He took the extraordinary measure of calling in the gold of all Americans, and revalued it from about $20.00 and ounce to $35.00 an ounce. But that didn't help much. All the while, Roosevelt had the emergency option of priming the pump using Treasury money – U.S. Notes, or "greenbacks" – but declined to do so in favor of sticking to "orthodox" debt financing. This also was at least partly because of the gold standard (which at that time included U.S. Notes), because we didn't have enough gold to allow issue of enough gold backed dollars. He had the power to suspend gold payments during the emergency, but didn't. He played the bankers' game. After gold was abandoned, our economy and the stock market began (slowly at first), to become casino-ized even worse than it had been in the 1920s. Money had became a function of the national debt – a pure debt currency. And, as time went on, Congress totally lost all the discipline that the gold standard had naturally enforced. They actually believed the con that a sizable national debt was a good and beneficial thing – that "we owed it to ourselves." Raising the debt ceiling became a routine function of our legislative branch, and the ceiling became easier to lift each time around. They began spending as if there was no limit to the amount of debt such a rich nation as ours could carry. Too much money is a bad thing. That's the definition of inflation. But inflation became an integral part of our monetary policy. It could be slowed down or speeded up, but never checked. So the remedy to our current economic was to blow the debt ceiling off entirely and and inflate by a trillion dollars in one fell swoop – with more promised. This, of course, is about as inflationary a move as could be imagined. It would seem the dollar would continue to collapse with hyper-inflation waiting down the road. So the strengthening of the dollar came as a little surprise – thanks in part to the weakness of other economies and currencies. And, in spite of the size of the bailout, much more money has been effectively wiped out of the markets than is being injected into it. So maybe deflation will overcome the inflation in both the short and long term. The big problem with the way we create money, however, means that debt always exceeds the ability to pay. And no matter how much money simply disappears from the economy down the rat hole, none of the debt disappears. It only gets bigger. What we will need is more, higher, and more creative, means of taxation. Alternatively, we need serious monetary reform. John Q. Pridger BUYING MONEY It's time to buy gold and silver to save for a rainy day. So, should you buy bullion coins or bars? If One ounce American Silver Eagles are an indication, bars seem to be the only sane way to go. Coins are generally considered more convenient, but where do you go to get a fair deal on what are called "bullion coins" like the Silver Eagle? The U.S. Mint sells them to dealers who sell to the public, and it appears to have become overly greedy. With silver now selling for about $9.00 an ounce, Pridger thought he'd buy a few Silver Eagles. But the Mint demands $25.00 for them! Private dealers naturally buy for less and still make a profit selling now for about $21.00. That premium and "profit" seem worthy of a Wall Street swindler. Whatever way you go, you have to pay over twice as much as the silver content.
THE PROGRESSIVE INCOME TAX – KARL MARX'S SOLUTION Tuesday, 21 October, 2008 WHAT! BALANCE THE BUDGET? It seemed surreal, but Pridger believes he heard Sarah Palin say that she and John McCain would balance the budget before the end of their first term. Pridger couldn't believe his ears. Of course, it was only a sound bite that Pridger saw and heard – so maybe it was a punch line from Saturday Night Live. President Ronald Reagan ran on a platform of cutting taxes and balancing the budget, and the red ink spiked beyond belief even as revenues shot up. In spite of his rhetoric, under Ronald Reagan government remained the problem. It was already far too late to balance the budget – government was too far too big and too far out of control. The red ink increased during George H. W. Bush administration, with the first Gulf War contributing nicely to deficit spending. Reagan's deregulation "cure" has come home to roost too. We thought he was going to deregulate "us" but he deregulated "them" – "them" being the very ones government most assuredly needed strict regulatory oversight – in order to keep them loyal to the nation and beneficial to the American workers. What Reagan had overlooked was that the "free enterprise" and "free markets" that made America great, were its own, not the world's. We let all of our marbles spill out of the American economy into globalized markets, giving unaccountable capital and financial interests free reign to maximize predatory practices on a global stage. Nonetheless, with the increased revenues which were largely a legacy of the Reagan years, President Clinton is alleged to have balanced the budget in the late 1990s – an incredible feat, considering that government had continued to grow. The Clinton years enjoyed some other great advantages. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, presented a wonderful opportunity to cut a considerable amount of defense spending. And, in spite of all the bombs American and NATO forces dropped over the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, he failed to commit the nation to a ground war during his presidency. Clinton lobbed a lot of ordinance into Iraq, and clobbered an alleged terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and bombed a pharmaceutical complex in Sudan. But over all, the Clinton years were relatively war free. Now, with two wars going on, and a couple others still possibly in the pipeline, and a major economic crisis which has already snowballed to a trillion dollars of unanticipated federal spending, Sarah Palin and John McCain are going to balance the budget? Where would they find the money to do it with? Tax cuts simply won't do it this time. Large tax hikes won't do it either. The downward business spiral has hardly begun in the wake of catastrophic economic events of the last few weeks. The goose that laid the golden eggs has already been slaughtered. Among others, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and author of The Conscience of a Liberal, says this isn't a time for government to engage in any belt tightening – it's time for a new "New Deal." The New Deal was the era when Keynesian deficit spending was legitimized. One simply does not balance a budget either during war or any facsimile of a "New Deal." much less a wartime New Deal. Our current and ongoing bailout of big bankers and rich, greedy, financiers and marketeers, is already a totally new kind of a new "New Deal." It will undoubtedly eventually be recognized as a "Raw Deal." If the media polls are right, Palin and McCain won't have the opportunity to balance the budget. An Obama administration will have to cope with all the red ink. Obama has been saying all along that his administration will be about change. Maybe it will be change of a nature he had not envisioned. John Q. Pridger THE OTHER CRISIS APPROACHING – FOOD! The sub-prime mortgage crisis; the liquidity crisis; and the stock market crash, of course, are also a monetary crisis. This is because our money system made the "casino-ization" of the economy possible. A debt monetary system, which requires expansion of debt in order to expand the money supply, cannot avoid encouraging increased debt at all levels of the economy. And the price of oil, though it has declined since the Stock Market crash, is contributing to our sense of crisis. So one crisis is being piled onto another. About the time we had our major monetary crisis back about 1970, followed by the first oil crisis, we were not only gearing up for a New World Order, but for a revolution in agriculture. Until then we'd had a sustainable, ecologically sound, and abundantly productive, agricultural system. Of course, there were problems in agriculture, but the problems were market related rather than systemic of the actual way food was grown and farms were operated. And, of course, many of the problems were the result of government bungling of farm policy. Every fix, made the situation worse. Ironically, there was a problem of over production of many agricultural commodities. So, naturally, the government decided that we needed a farm program that would increase production, and change farming from what it was to something more like a real factory.
COLLIN POWELL'S OCTOBER SURPRISE Pridger isn't surprised that Colin Powell will be voting for Obama, but there are some ironies. As George Bush's Secretary of State, General Powell was the point man in the administration's effort to sell the Iraq War to both the American people and the world. But Pridger had the feeling at that very time that Powell was allowing himself to be used against his moral inclinations and better judgment. He didn't think the war was a good idea. He had cautioned his boss (to the effect), "If we break it, we've bought it." And how right he was! In all likelihood, General Powell has been unable to forgive Bush and the neo-cons for using him, nor forgive himself for allowing himself to be used. In his famous speech to the UN General Assembly, making the case for invading Iraq, he knew he was repeating false allegations and and half-truths, and he knew he was compromising his own integrity. So Powell has broken with his own party to support Obama. There are other possibilities too, as one email Pridger has received has speculated:
General Powell did look a little uneasy as he made his announcement. Has he sold out again under some sort of duress? This would be pure speculation, of course. Speaking of "selling out," how is it that the black candidate is able to outspend his opponent four to one? As of now it is beginning to look as though Obama's campaign will be the most expensive ever in the history of presidential campaigns – maybe more expensive than all previous campaigns combined! Something seems fishy here, on the face of things. Aren't the Republicans supposed to be the big money people? Money talks, and money is what makes the media both talk and pay attention. And when the media talks, it mold's public opinion. And it seems that Obama has gone on record as being in favor of campaign finance reform – but not for him, at least not right now. Much is being made of McCain bringing up things like Obama's past association with people like William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. McCain and Sarah Palin are being pilloried for "inferring" that maybe Obama is a terrorist. That's totally ridiculous. As Democratic attack dog, James Carlin might have said, "It's the associations, stupid!" Prior associations are usually considered important in presidential politics. But not in Obama's case. Nobody has inferred that Obama is a terrorist by those associations. He's associated for long periods of time with unrepentant radicals, both white and black. What white candidate would be able to survive allegations of such associations? Much less, if they were acknowledged to be true. What is crystal clear is that, in presidential politics (as in many other things), there's one standard for blacks and another for whites. If Obama's associations counted, we simply couldn't get our first black president in this particular presidential election season. So the media is being very careful not to place any importance on Barack's questionable associations. We're not talking of unifying the nation by electing the first black president – we're actively showing what the racial divide really is. With John McCain it's "Heads, he wins, and tails, he loses." But, for Barack Obama, it's apparently supposed to be, "Heads, he wins, and tails, he wins." This is definitely not a good sign. This is nothing less than Affirmative Action in presidential politics! John Q. Pridger Thursday, 16 October, 2008 WHY OUR SYSTEM NO LONGER WORKS Our economic system is failing because of neglect of simple mathematical realities.
As the dollar goes, so do we.
Those are realities which should be self-evident in a realistic world. But we took departure from economic realities a long time ago. Here are some other one liners to ponder.
These are only a few of the things that effect our fundamental economic situation. When food has to travel an average of 1,500 miles to market, it's very easy to envision a time when a lot of people could go hungry. If we would have broad-based prosperity and maximize our liberties. We would discover that small is better than big.
John Q. Pridger Wednesday, 15 October, 2008 OUR NEW GOD IS VERY ILL Frederick Nietzsche said, "God is dead... And we have killed him." This theme surfaced in many of Nietzsche's works, and he suggested that men would have have to become gods – and these supermen would have to fill the void.
Others, more contemporary, took up the call, assigning literal context to Nietzsche's allegory. They attempted to clarify things – that God isn't only dead, but He was never was alive. They don't take credit for having killed Him. Man didn't kill God. God was just a bad idea in the first place, they effectively said, but "good riddance" – now we have become enlightened, and can forge ahead and seek true happiness. Finally, the supermen of financial capitalism arose to fill the breech, and we worshiped gleefully, like them, at the altar of Mammon. We rejoiced in our hedonism and our orgy of consumerism. "Well intended" organizations like the ACLU deployed themselves cleaning up the residue of old faiths – busily trying to abolish God's lingering shadows from across our nation. The supermen of Financial Capitalism superceded our need for God and provided us with the seductive cult of consumerism. And we were so happy. Now their god has faltered and taken ill again – for it is not the first time we have suffered pains of withdrawal from faith in a Higher Law. The supermen were stricken down in 1929, and their flocks suffered a decade of atonement. But the supermen regained their vigor and authority with the advent of unlimited global warfare. But once again, the supermen have been revealed to be without clothes, for they are not the real supermen. They were the cult leaders of the cult of the markets and trading, Las Vegas style. Now they are pleading for our indulgence – to stop the leaks in their vessels. For, if their vessels sink, we shall all drown. The wizards of finance have been exquisitely exposed in their fallibility, and the worshippers are expected and required to fill the collection plate. Now we must clothe the emperor lest we be deprived of our future. Bad mortgages – things that should have been only of the most local concern – tipped the balance and dumped the world-class vessels of Mammon. Bad mortgages put some of the biggest supermen into desperate straits – a great lack of liquidity seems to have been the problem – and that knocked the wind out of the stock market. Not even the supermen could pull rabbits out of the hat fast enough to keep up with their malignant and quickly metastasizing problem. The hot air escaping from their bloated "assets" could not be monetized fast enough in any credible fashion – so they could no longer sell their derivatives it or even loan it out any more hot air. Congress went into emergency mode to save the day. They worked hard over a critical weekend and beyond – working hard day and night to save the economy – taking only Rosh Hashanah off. As a consequence of the rescue plan that resulted, the second week of October was the worst day on Wall Street ever. Since our supermen had convinced the world to do things our way, global markets did the same. Then, demonstrating the powers of supermen, Monday the 13th was Wall Street's best day in its history. But the wind had already been knocked out of the market, and the market's best day ever didn't come close to refilling the collapsed balloon. Fortunately other supermen had come to the rescue – people with access to the deepest secret fonts of Voodoo Economics. They devised a plan to save at least the carcass in hopes of saving enough of the hide to start pumping it up again. By tapping into the presumed resources and production of the distant future, a new source of hot air is being forged and the pumps are working overtime. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously spent hundreds of millions to prime the pump after taking office in 1933. On or present occasion, hundreds of billions were appropriated in one day! Other billions had already been spent, and hundreds more will be spent. They aren't even priming the pump yet, they're revving up the air compressors. Maybe they'll get to the pump later. Unheard of volumes of money – representing the sweat and blood of future generations – are being manufactured to bridge the gapping rents and re-inflate the sagging fabric of the carcass. Staggering volumes of debt are being piled on top the already inverted and overhanging debt pyramid – to "stabilize" global markets. Once the markets are stabilized, maybe we can get around to working on the actual problems. Then again, maybe not. Maybe a little prayer is in order – if God isn't dead. Wish us luck. We're all in this together, thanks to the brightest and the best – the supermen who have built this unwieldy global contraption called the New World Order. Pridger's old Pappy used to call it the "Wonderful New World" – where Americans were expected to prosper by "taking in each others' laundry." The conspiracy pundits were right nearly two decades ago when they characterized it as the "New World Disorder." John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 14 October, 2008 YESTERDAY WAS COLUMBUS DAY If Congress was called upon to vote on a national holiday to commemorate Columbus's discovery of the New World today, they wouldn't have the guts to pass it. It's too politically incorrect. It would outrage liberals and Native Americans. In today's politically corrected world, Columbus came to the New World to ravage and plunder, and the ultimate result, after centuries of sustained ethnic cleansing, has been such abominations as the United States of America. The only thing conceivably worse was the Holocaust. Pridger feels so bad about all of this that sometimes he wishes he could go back to the mother country. But the mother countries are atoning for their role in the Enlightenment by only accepting Arabs and Asians these days. We're atoning too, of course (as best we can), by only welcoming Hispanics, Africans, Asians, East Indians, Arabs, etc., etc., to our shores. Speaking as an Anglo-Saxon, Lord knows we need a lot more of them to set things right – so we can make it beyond our terrible guilt complex. How better, and more generously, to atone for past sins than by awarding our nation to the diverse peoples of the world? Thank goodness our trusty leaders had to foresight to get the ball rolling soon after it occurred to them that "equal rights" applied to all Americans. It was an easy leap for our stellar leadership to conclude that it was hypocritical and discriminatory to just represent the rights of Americans. Why not just change the character and racial complexion of the entire nation by presuming to represent and accommodate the world? After all, perhaps this would give them, not only the right, but the moral imperative, to presume to rule it. Fortunately we Anglo-Americans have also had the foresight to get our birth rate down to almost negative growth levels. It won't be all that long until we've successfully reduced ourselves to a minority racial group – perhaps even a disadvantaged, or even persecuted, minority group. Maybe then we will be allowed to be proud of who we are (or were) – and we might qualify for some special considerations. On the other hand, we might become the next "Untouchable" caste. It's our duty to feel guilty about what our race has done since Columbus first planted the Spanish colors in the New World. Perhaps Columbus Day should be re-characterized from a day to celebrate, to our "Day of Atonement." Maybe the 4th of July should also be re-characterized likewise. In fact, looking at the whole array of national holidays that Congress has passed through the centuries of our short national history, Martin Luther King Day is the only one that stands for anything, or any one, worthy of celebrating. John Q. Pridger BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AN ARAB? A lot of Americans are falling for the mis-information that Obama's father was an Arab. Who is educating the American people on this subject? For one, there are web sites like http://www.arcadeathome.com, an "arcade game" site of all things. At least Pridger was recently directed to that link by a well-intended emailer, to prove that Barack Obama is an Arab. Obviously, many game playing Americans get their information from such sources. Here's what that site had to say about Obama – and it had much more to say as well:
Wow! We've learned a lot there! Not only was the author of that little piece an anti-Obama person, but a wholesale tar and brush person to boot! Not only was Obama, Sr. an Arab, but (move over Bill Clinton!) "Thomas Jefferson was actually our first black president" – and Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, were also part black too, by various stretches of the imagination! But let's just look at the allegation that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was of predominantly Arab rather than black African ancestry. We can merely look at photographs of Mr. Obama, Sr. to be fairly certain that he is much more African than Arab, rather than 12.5% African Negro and 87.5% Arab. From appearances, it would be the other way around, if it even matters. Centuries before the white man became a factor on the east coast of sub-Sahara Africa, Arabs had established trading enclaves there. Ivory and slaving were the big businesses, but a broad assortment of other things were traded too, and Arab merchants pioneered, organized, and conducted, the trade. Naturally, a class of African commercial trading partners developed, and these allies produced increasingly Arab-ized African commercial enclaves in conjunction with their Arab benefactors. They eventually developed into a caste above "ordinary" Africans (at least in their own estimation). Most adopted Islam as their religion. Many intermarried, or otherwise mixed, with Arabs, and those with some Arab blood became sort of a "high African caste" who culturally identified with Arabs rather than their tribal antecedents. Thus many Africans with a smattering of Arab blood preferred to call themselves Arabs. So, if Barack Obama, Sr.'s birth certificate says he is an Arab, it doesn't necessarily mean that he is of predominately Arab blood or ancestry. In any case, what does it matter? It doesn't mean our presidential candidate is an Arab. For all practical intents and purposes he's simply 50% Caucasian, and 50% African. But that doesn't matter either. Our laws say that if Barack, or anybody else, was born in the United States, he is 100% American. Even if he were born abroad to an American parent he may be qualified as a "natural born" American. It wouldn't matter if both his parents were illegal aliens, provided he was born on American soil. It wouldn't matter even if his father was a bona fide Arab terrorist housed at Gitmo, for the sons and daughters are not held accountable for the sins of the father. Willful associations are another matter, of course. But past associations are often really past, and irrelevant – unless there is a pattern of such associations that were perhaps merely abandoned for reasons of political ambitions. Is Barack a Christian? Church membership means nothing. Nobody really knows but Obama is but himself. As far as the rest of us are concerned, if he says he is a Christian, and behaves somewhat like a Christian, he's a Christian. It doesn't matter if his father was an atheist or Moslem, or Barack, Jr. himself was a Moslem in his youth. It's what he is now that counts. As far as Pridger is concerned, there's no question as to whether or not Barack Obama is technically and intellectually qualified to be president. What bothers Pridger is that out of all the presidential material we have in the nation, we have a Barack Hussein Obama, whose paternal pedigree is one generation out of Africa running for president on the Democratic ticket. What were they thinking? And it also bothers Pridger that he is poised to win! Obama's a good man. He may be the best man left in the race. Pridger wouldn't vote for McCain in preference to Obama on personal merits. But Obama doesn't reflect any American tradition except those "very liberal traditions" that had been destroying America since before the Republicans joined in and accelerated the destruction. If McCain doesn't' come up with the magic formula in this evening's debate, only the race factor could possibly same him – and that factor may not be enough. We simply no longer have a sufficient supply of racially biased whites to elect a white man on the basis of race alone. Too many of them actually look at the real issues – and, like their black compatriots, they will vote for whichever candidate promises the most material benefits. "Change" means more largess from the public treasury. And they (Democrat or Republican), don't give two hoots how it is financed – as long as they aren't going to be called on to pay higher taxes. Obama supporters are voicing fears that race may play a role in the election processes. But it's a good thing for Obama that it will. Obama will get almost the entire black vote, and maybe only slightly less than half of the white and "other" vote – and that could put him over the top. What more could he expect? John Q. Pridger THE RACIAL DIMENSION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST In spite of all rhetoric, or lack thereof, race is one of the biggest factors in the present presidential race. It literally permeates the contest. In fact, it's such a large factor, that it appears half the electorate is inclined to "vote for the black guy" because it's the only hope for any kind of change. The white guy doesn't hold out any hope for change. Actually, the black guy doesn't either, but there is the perception that electing the nation's first black president, in and of itself, would at least stand for a big change. It will be a major milestone in American politics. 232 years of white rule have delivered up national bankruptcy and a global economic meltdown. Time for a change. What do you chose, black or white? That is the choice. And it's the only real choice. It's a compelling choice too. Now that Barack is so far ahead, he'd better win. If he doesn't there's likely to be riots in the streets, and we'll fully discover just how much this election is about race. If McCain wins, it will be considered evidence of a continuing overall racial bias among the electorate – a racist win. And a racist win will not be taken lightly by the malevolent side of the black community. If Obama wins. Everything will be okay – except for the economy, and out future. But the same would be true under McCain after the riots have subsided. The choice is white or black, and nothing of substance. It never is anything of substance. Substance is always filtered out of presidential politics early in the primaries. That's the way our political system works. THE WAR DIFFERENCE McCain is seen as a war monger simply because he wants to finish the job in Iraq. But, effectively, Obama is a war monger too. It's just that he doesn't feel the job in Iraq is worth finishing. But he wants to finish the job in Afghanistan, because Osama bin Laden is reputed to be lurking there somewhere, or just across the border in Pakistan. Pridger agrees that maybe it's better to have only one big quagmire than two. But the Afghanistan quagmire is potentially much stickier than the Iraqi quagmire. The problem with Afghanistan is that it is a little further away from anything we can call our vital national interest. It's harder to get to. There aren't any seaports. Literally everything required for our war effort has to be flown in over long distances or transported across another large country – an increasingly hostile "ally." Of course, in either case, the definition of what would constitute "victory" and "finishing the job" is critical. We defeated the Iraqi army and got Saddam, but "the job" is supposedly not finished there yet. Maybe a hundred years might do it – and that favors the black candidate. Americans are tired of the same old war on TV all the time. Barack would cut and run, which is probably the smartest option we have there. If getting Osama would constitute "getting the job" done in Afghanistan, the matter seems fairly simple. But we haven't found him in seven years of trying. If he's already dead, or even living in a penthouse in New York, we could spend another hundred years on that search too. But the job won't be done when we've satisfied our blood lust against bin Laden. Because, just as in the case with Saddam Hussein, that isn't really the goal. The goal is so large that it boggles the mind. We'll have to await the continuing financial fallout in order to determine whether we are still capable of pursuing those grandiose goals. Chances are, we'll have to pull in our horns at some point, and start doing a little tidying up at home. Of course, now that we've begun baiting the Bear again, the prospect of all-out war is once again appearing to be a viable option. Total war presents many promising opportunities to get out from under financially stressful situations. At least that was the traditional view. But things are somewhat changed now. Next time around, we might have a serious problem with the total war scenario. It might alienate and cut off all our suppliers. If, for example, the China trade were severed, where would all of us ordinary Americans get all of our stuff? Would the Defense Department be able get enough stuff to sustain a global war? John Q. Pridger Saturday, 11 October, 2008 AMERICAN LEADERSHIP LEADING TO A POST-AMERICAN WORLD Fareed Zakaria's book, The Post American World (published in May of this year), tells us a lot about the world our misdirected American leadership has helped to create. They (America's imperialistic neoconic and corporate movers and shakers), thought the twenty-first century was going to be a "new American century" – a century in which American financial and military hegemony would continue unchallenged. Greedy corporate planners actually thought that while they supplied the U.S. Market with Chinese production, China's vast market was destined to be "theirs" too! But China is going both keep, and develop, their own market during the twenty-first century. The same applies to India's markets and those of other forward looking nations. The twenty-first century is not going to be the "new American century" – at least it seems highly unlikely at this point in time. Arguably, the twentieth century was the American century – but, in the end, it was a century of blunder, misappropriated military and financial power, and lost opportunity – and most of all, lost economy. The cards were totally rearranged in the twentieth century (twice – once during WWII and again during globalization), and are going to be totally rearranged again in the twenty-first century. They are about to be rearranged right now. Ironically, our leadership's response to America slipping into trade deficits as the result of opening our markets to Japanese autos and electronics, and our increasing dependence on foreign oil, the leadership went on to aggressively propel us into broad spectrum national dependence – exponentially exacerbating all of our economic problems! Already recognizing the economic downside of becoming oil dependent, our leaders took active steps to make sure Americans became dependent on foreign producers for the whole array of essential consumer goods, in addition to oil. The leadership determinedly undermined our nation's productive industrial base, and transformed it into a mega-consumptive service-based economy! Predominately finance based at that! What were they thinking? Incredibly, in the name of free trade and globalism, the national goal become to make America into a conspicuously consumptive nation of non-producers – dependent on others elsewhere for literally everything, including money! And, worse! While making this totally irrational national transformation to national economic weakness and vulnerability, they thought we were not only leading the world toward the light, but still fully in charge and able to rule the world from this increasingly weakened position! They thought we had a big ace in the hole – the fact that Federal Reserve money was the world's reserve currency. The entire world economy was ours, they seemed to reason – because it essentially constituted our national debt. To them, this put us in an unassailable position of power. But, of course, this was backwards and upside down economic thinking – Voodoo Economics. By some stretch of rational though processes, they thought this would work in our favor and make us immune from the consequences of our folly. Even more ironically, aside from all the gross mistakes that had been made by the American leadership during the latter half of the twentieth century (and, of course, because of some of them), it was the events of 9/11/2001 – supposedly engineered and undertaken by a small motley crew of Islamic extremists – that ultimately tipped the balance and laid waste, not only to the dream of the new American century, but the continued viability, or correct-ability, of our own financial system. Prior to 9/11 we had already been courting financial disaster for a long time. We were already technically bankrupt by any traditional economic measure. But when we mobilized the world's largest, most sophisticated, deadliest, and most expensive, military machine – for a full-blown global war (against, not hostile nations, but essentially against two individuals) – we committed the grossest of all possible national blunders. There is probably no parallel to it in history. Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, and posed no threat to our national security, was quickly vanquished and finally hanged. But Iraq itself (an entire nation), hangs like a heavy anchor around our neck. Six years of financially debilitating war, with no end in sight, have been devoted to a man who has already been hanged.
Osama bin Laden, who allegedly master-mined 9/11, and who did have hostile intentions toward the United States, is still at large. And he's the subject of the largest and most expensive manhunt in the history of mankind. Even more of our precious resources are going to be devoted to "that man." Imagine that! The world's only remaining superpower focusing its might on flushing out a single individual and his rag-tag band of followers! This is totally incredible on the face of it – and we can't even be certain that bin Laden is still alive! But we'll devote billions of dollars, and many more American lives, to flushing him out – even if it means years of war in a far-off, isolated, corner of the world. Of course, we know all of this warfare and loss of life and treasure is not really about Saddam and Osama. It was about the "new American century" and the conquest of the region that possesses the richest depository of oil in the world. And, of course, it was (and continues to be), about securing Israel's future – something that tends to preempt all consideration of all other American national interests in our Middle East foreign policy. To these ends, war, nation destruction, nation re-building, and democratization, are what we have been doing – while our own nation suffers from critical breakdown on several levels – moral, cultural, industrial, and financial. The second week of October – an October surprise! – was the worst week in the history of Wall Street and global stock markets. That was somewhat of a wakeup call that may, in time, change everything, and reorganize global finance. 9/11 changed the world, and the October surprise will change it some more. In Reverend Jeremiah Wright's vernacular, "The chickens are coming home to roost" – again! And they will keep coming until we re-discover that "our country" is within its long established geographical boundaries, and we need to fix it. It's worth fixing. America doesn't need to run the world, it needs to run itself. A Post American World will force upon us the opportunity for America to heal itself. It will force us to turn inward again to a degree, forcing a reexamination of our national values and our potential to really be great (and good), again. Whether that can, or will, be done, of course, remains to be seen. An independent and largely self-reliant America, as a productive and positive influence in the world, is what we need, rather than an America attempting to dominate the world. That idea, and that option, was never a good idea – it was a totally un-American idea. If that option was ever a viable and attainable one, it would have completed the destruction of that "city on the hill." But even if it was an attainable goal, it has already been frittered and bungled away. History will record that the "new American century" and the global empire it envisioned, was tripped up, not by two men (Saddam and Osama), or even by al Qaeda and the phantom Muslim hoards, but by the national leadership itself – a leadership that lost sight of its own national identity and ignored its own Constitutional mandate. It stumbled and fell on a global vision of empire, and for lack of an enlightened national vision. Our leaders betrayed their sacred trust of office, and the people of the world will suffer for it before things are sorted out again. In our current crisis there is both "tragedy and hope." What remains to be seen is whether that hope is justified and fulfilled. Or will we merely be deflected to even greater minefields of error? John Q. Pridger GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN? Those words are being bantered about today as the G20, twenty of the world's developed and developing nations, are beginning to grapple with a an increasing global financial crisis. Ah! The wonders of globalism! Isn't a global economy, and "international interdependence" great? We've all got to get together and contain the consequences of our collective folly under American financial leadership! Our crash of 1929, and the Great Depression that followed was contagious enough. This time around, because of globalism, the contagion is magnitudes worse. And just a few months ago we were totally paranoid over the bird flue! No president or presidential candidate is big enough, or qualified enough, to grapple with this. It's too big for even the world's all time greatest super power – our military is helpless to fight it (short of maybe participating in another "total" World War, to re-shuffle the entire global card deck and start the game over). This is a problem created over decades of time by the world's smartest financial geniuses and their bankers. It's their job to get themselves (and the rest of us), out of it. Big money will be thrown toward all points of the compass. Not just our money, but theirs too – but mostly ours. So, when the world's smartest financial geniuses get together to work out the problem, there's no telling what will come out of it. You can bet its going to be both ingenious and expensive. And if it doesn't work, start preparing your garden spot for next spring. Goodies could start becoming scarce. The very idea of "Voodoo Economics" was born in the United States, right alongside the New World Order. And Voodoo Economics, Pridger is sorry to say, will have to play a very large role in restoring some sort of global economic stability. There's no other way to do it. It's impossible to get from insanity to sanity in a single step. Smoke and mirrors will have to be more widely redeployed, with more mirrors than before – perhaps setting the mirrors a startlingly new angles. One positive thing – there's already plenty of smoke. The financial magicians and cultists are going to have to pool their knowledge and pull some rabbits out of their hats. No telling what they'll come up with, but Pridger predicted years ago that they'd eventually have no choice but to liquidate considerable unpayable debt – perhaps by bundling up junk bonds, derivative bombs, and a few of financial wizard scapegoats, and launching them into high earth orbit – maybe even solar orbit – with a "Payable, redeemable, or collectable, on re-entry," note attached. Once some sort of financial stability is restored, maybe we can take the time to think of something serious. Maybe next time around the monetary and financial game will be back to some sort of sanity rather than a Ponzi-scheme that ends up being a game of Russian Roulette. Maybe we'll rediscover the idea that its better to have money that doesn't have a perpetual debt tail attached to it, whether it be paper scrip or gold and silver coin in substance. Maybe we'll discover that Production + Price = Income, and that it's better to have people occupied at production than being financial wizards – so that production can produce the prices needed to pay a decent income. That it's better to make American cars in America rather than on the other side of the world. John Q. Pridger Friday, 10 October, 2008 NEW WORLD ORDER IMPLODING? "Change is coming!" as Barack Obama and John McCain have been saying. But it's not the change either had in mind. The much ballyhooed "International Interdependence" has exposed the rest of the world to our economic meltdown. So much for what George H. W. Bush called the "long held aspirations of mankind." Without Pat Buchanan's help, the New World Order may be coming down! And it's coming down around our ears. Liberalism's Utopian "global village," and Corporate imperialists' global free market Utopia are falling as a single body. The globalized corporate mega-systems, in charge of the global "free market system" are coming under acute pressure, and coming unglued. Let Pridger remind you that this snowballing economic crisis was set off by the American sub-prime mortgage real estate crisis – just one of the big tables in our casino-like financial and investment structure. Let's also remember that house mortgages, one and all, should have been strictly local matters – between individual home buyers and the local bankers or mortgage companies. But we forgot that simple, common sense, truth – and simple private American housing mortgages (millions of them), have been packaged, sold to the world, and went from there to facilitate an international liquidity crisis. This would be totally impossible in a rational world. Bad mortgages have been repackaged and sold globally like stocks and bonds to any fool willing to buy them. And an array of derivatives have been developed and sold to hide truth and reality from hapless investors. And, as Pridger pointed out a long time ago, derivatives are the HIV/AIDS of the global economy. This could be the big one that anybody with the slightest insight could see coming at least from the time the "new international economic order" was announced in the early 1980s. When you deregulate the very corporate entities that need the most careful public oversight, and proclaim "free trade" and "international interdependence" as a national goal – and then take active steps to undermine American domestic production, subsidizing a wholesale move of factories and jobs offshore and south of the border, what else could be expected than exactly what is happening? When decide to have a "service economy" rather than an industrial economy, you cease creating the wealth required to drive the economy and pay for all the exponentially increasingly consumptive services. When, for an increasing lack of real wealth production (having delegated that chore to others elsewhere), you begin funding the economy through debt expansion, and encouraging people to start tapping into the equity of their homes in order to maintain their living standards and increase their consumption, what would you expect? When an entire huge and prosperous nation begins spending its capital rather than producing income, and borrowing to "keep the economy strong" while others elsewhere do all the productive labor, and global corporations rake in the fruits of their labor, the chicken eventually come home to roost. This didn't happen in the last eight years, it has been happening since we first opened our market to cheap Japanese imports and started selling out American producers and once strong American manufacturers. From that time on we have been in a race to the floor as far as our domestic economy is concerned. It has been happening because mis-representatives have always been the overwhelming majority in Congress, and our leaders thought they could remake the world in our image simply by turning Japanese, Mexican, and Chinese into "our" producers and Americans "their" consumers. Giving our domestic markets to others elsewhere, under the false flag of forward looking Capital innovation and debt financial capitalism on steroids – and turning our national economic destiny over to financial interests and the large corporations that have grown up around them, and giving them license to manage a global economy, with no public oversight or accountability, was pure madness – certain national economic suicide. Made in Washington D.C. We weren't alone in this madness. The whole industrial world climbed aboard our train and helped stoke the fires as we barreled into a promising tunnel with a light at the end. The economic melt down is global, and European governments have begun scratching their disheveled heads, wondering how they ever let us get them into such a situation in the first place. When America burns, the world goes down in flames. That's what international interdependence, pushed beyond all rationality, actually means. They should have known, just as we should have known. Local and domestic economic self-reliance is not only good, but the only rational way for people and nations to have any sort of sustainable economic security. Literally everybody knew that until everybody was conned by the "New World Order" vision. The scary thing is that the worst may not have happened yet. It's going to take time for the full force of the present blowback to manifest itself. Just think what would happen if our international trade, say with China, were interrupted by the worsening economic situation? If the shipping companies that have become our "consumer goods" lifeline start to fail, we'll find ourselves up the proverbial creek without access to all of the goodies we need in order to be good global consumers. Thank the Lord China has plenty of money. Maybe they can buy up enough shipping to keep their manufactured goods flowing to our markets. But if they are also called upon to loan us the money to allow American consumers to purchase their production, they might tire of serving our market and initiate a crash program to develop their own. Read Mao's Little Red Book to find out what China is likely to do when the chips are down. Develop China, of course, and forever vanquish the imperialist West. But that's speculation. We have other problems that are much more immediate in nature. The cards are falling. The stock market is down an eye-popping 36%. People are being wiped out, big banks and big corporations are in big trouble. We're in for big trouble. As president Reagan said, "We haven't seen anything yet!" We've just spent at trillion dollars just to calm growing fears. Multiple trillions have just disappeared from global markets anyway. What else could be expected, especially when they told us (immediately after the money was appropriated), that the rescue wouldn't work for a matter of months? The $700 billion was supposed to be the "fix." That's what people thought. But it's worse than anybody thought. A trillion dollars is just a drop in the bucket. When McCain, a few short weeks ago, assured us that the economy was essentially sound, he was doing the only rational and responsible thing – trying to buoy public confidence in the stability of the house of cards sitting on shifting sand. He and his fellows in Congress had helped build it. Obama laid it out in more honest terms, and may have helped tip the behemoth off the cliff. That wasn't a good idea – but the behemoth would have gone off the cliff anyway. You can't stop the collapse of a national and global Ponzi scheme. The laws of physics always win out in the end. Then, as things started to break, McCain corrected himself. American workers, he said, are strong – not the economy itself. That didn't help either. American workers are not making much these days. Lots of them are unemployed, and most of the rest are either retired or occupied in fast food and financial services, rather than producing the things that make a strong economy. Pridger has predicted, both long ago and recently, that we are destined to live in interesting times. This is already an national emergency. But Bush hasn't proclaimed an official national emergency yet, and taken over dictatorial powers. Nationalization of the entire economy potentially in the cards. This could force a major correction in monetary policy. We need greenback currency to re-stoke the economy – not more debt. But we have so many national weaknesses that no remedy is going to allow a quick fix. Our major, self-imposed, handicap is our great lack of productive industries to produce the basic consumer goods we all take for granted. Everything we need, including most of our food, comes from elsewhere at great cost. You simply can't recharge an economy with service industries. We've got to rebuild the industrial powerhouse our leaders have just, so successfully, completed tearing down. Investors are being "forced" into Treasury Bills, as the only safe place for money they've removed from the stock market. If Treasury Bill are the only safe haven for investors in the troubled times, the time has come for Treasury Notes (U.S. Notes) for money. John Q. Pridger Tuesday, 7 October, 2008 THE DEBATE The debate merely told us that both candidates are empire jingoists, with Obama soft on victory in Iraq and McCain wanting to hang in there for "victory in Iraq." Obama is for diplomacy while rattling the sword and McCain is for rattling the sword before diplomacy. Both are for more war on Terror, maybe war on Iran, and talking tough to Russia – returning to a new containment policy, with the containment now much closer to the heart of Russia, surrounding it with NATO – the old anti-Russian alliance. Obama keeps reminding us that the invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake – which it was. But he has also shown that he really doesn't know the basic motive for our invasion of Iraq, nor the larger strategy behind it. It wasn't to fight terrorism or eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but to gain a firm foothold in the keystone of the Persian Gulf, secure the oil fields, and eliminate a credible threat to Israel. Obama wants more troops in Afghanistan, and Pakistan if necessary, to find the phantom and win the War on Terror once and for all. He doesn't see Afghanistan as an even bigger problem than Iraq. Ultimately, we can't win anything in Afghanistan. At best we might make it a relatively safe host for oil and gas pipelines, but we can't maintain a police force large enough to deny sanctuary for radical Muslims. The country is full of radical Muslim. That's what Muslims are in our view. As for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, just imagine the entire focus of the world's only super power being centered on a single individual who hasn't been seen in months or years and may no longer even exist! Al Qaeda and the Taliban aren't going to go away or disappear because of our presence in Afghanistan. No matter how long we stay, and how many people we kill, they'll still be there when we finally tire of the chase after we've bled ourselves dry. We cannot hold Afghanistan any more than we can hold Iraq. In the end, our democracy building (if successful), can only deliver up lastingly hostile Islamic states. Iraq is already less "westernized" than when Saddam was in power. And Afghanistan will return to being a radicalized Islamic state, but with a lot of sophisticated communications equipment. We're already bankrupt but simply refuse to admit it. Because we are bankrupt, the economy is supposedly the big issue in the forefront of public concern. The problem is global because we have gone global rather than remained national. We've exchanged our national independence for international interdependence. For this reason, we (and our mis-representatives in Washington), do not have the ability to solve our own problems because we've gone out of our way to make ourselves the world's dumping ground and have no way to get out from under the trash flow. All we can do is attempt to increase both the national and international cash flow by exponentially increasing our own debt burdens. In recent years U.S. housing has been the cash cow of the economy, with housing prices going up in a spree of sub-prime mortgage lending that made it possible for poor, mentally challenged, people to purchase housing at grossly inflated prices with no money down and only monthly interest payments – this with the hope the value would go up, permitting them to get a second mortgage to provide the "income" necessary to maintain the living standards to which they had become accustomed. When the inevitable started happening, home owners (who never really came close to being home "owners"), started defaulting. Bad mortgages were packaged and made into a whole new investment industry with phantom assets traded as if there was value where the value was already gone. Big boys, including many foreigners bought up a lot of America this way, thinking there was nothing more sound than investing in American real estate. The whole thing was insane. Yet many of the big boys (old, tried and true, and once respected, pillars of finance) got caught holding a lot of empty bags. With some of the biggest banks and financial houses crumbling, the crisis bled over into the stock market which had been inflating right along with housing. The market was (and still is), so over valued that it had nowhere to go but down, scaring hell out of everybody with a stake in the markets. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of people who would never have thought of going to the casino to make money. But they had faith in the market. Fortunately, they still do. They have to, unless they want to see all the hot air let out of Wall Street. So, when John McCain told us that the economy was basically sound a few weeks ago, he was only doing the responsible thing – attempting to buoy public confidence. If confidence flags, the stock market can do nothing but continue to fall. McCain caved when things started to unravel and Obama challenged him on the fundamentally strong economy. He admitted that it wasn't the economy itself that was strong, but the American workers behind it. Unfortunately, most of those workers aren't doing so well, because most of the work now making the American way of life possible is performed by Chinese, Mexican, and other foreign workers elsewhere. Our energy needs are provided by others elsewhere as well. Politicians like McCain and Obama, for more than a generation, have been helping to build a New World Order, where American workers no longer have to produce what Americans consume. They merely have to consume, be smart, and take advantage of all the opportunities provided by financial wizardry – be knowledge workers. This, of course, has delivered us to where we are today. And nobody – certainly none of our politicians – is willing to admit they have egg on their face. The problem now is to save the absconders and thereby the economy. So pick a number, any number – but it must be a really big number – and tell the people this will stabilize the markets and prevent an economic melt down. Say, $700 billion dollars. Neither candidate has a handle on the economic crisis. Both can only rubber stamp banker solutions and debate about who will get tax cuts and who will get cut. Both have to favor some sort of national universal health care plan in addition to saving the economy. Mutually exclusive projects which will cost more credit money than they've already pledged on our behalf. McCain sees the overall policy of empire and knows that Iraq is the key to our entire Middle East strategy. Otherwise they might as well be the same candidate, with both spending more time on unc puts the blame for the current crisis on the last eight years. It's really a cumulative phenomena that started more than fifty years ago, perhaps with Kennedy's New Frontier, and Johnson's Great Society, and progressed through successive Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses. McCain goes back to fellow Republican Herbert Hoover to mention that "protectionism" finished crashing the economy at the beginning of the Great Depression. From the beginning of the Republic, protectionism played a major role in making us an industrial powerhouse. The Holocaust was dutifully alluded to by both candidates, with the "Never Again" motto trooped out, effectively, by both. Obama wants to finish the war on Terror by shifting American troops to Afghanistan and hunting down Osama bin Ladin. But bin Ladin hasn't been seen for a number of years. If he isn't already dead, he's probably living in a New York penthouse under the protection of a witness protection program. Both candidates are hopeless and promise to keep us permanently engaged in war. If not in our our own national interests, in the interests of Israel and petroleum, under the guise of national security. McCain is more up front about out and out jingoistic belligerency. He mentioned that Teddy Roosevelt was his hero, and sighted his oft quoted, "Tread and speak softly, but carry a big stick." Teddy carried a big stick and had an influence on our own natural sphere of influence in the western hemisphere. Where he would stand on an America with troops in 130 nations and ongoing wars in two countries, courting further difficulties with a Russia legitimately concerned about its own natural sphere of influence is highly questionable. Pridger suspects Teddy would have preferred to wield his big stick from a more consolidated, secure, position. Monday, 6 October, 2008 WHAT WOULD DAVY HAVE DONE? We have no frontiersmen like David Crockett in Congress today, but perhaps "Mr. No," Ron Paul, comes closest. If Colonel Crockett was a member of Congress today, he might repeat a speech he gave on the House floor in the early 1830s. The House of Representatives had taken up the matter of a bill for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Many representatives gave favorable speeches with regard to the bill, and it appeared it would pass. But David Crockett took the floor and said:
The bill, which had been expected to pass unanimously, only got a few votes. If Crockett was a member of Congress today, with a charity bill before him asking $700 billion dollars to bail out a whole system of dishonest or incompetent individuals and financial institutions – this, in order to spare the nation the hardship of getting back onto an honest and level economic playing field – there's little doubt as to how he would have voted. No doubt Colonel Crockett would have given a much longer and more powerful speech. But Crockett had not always been a "Mr. No." Some years before, he had helped enact a $20,000.00 bill for the relief of the victims of a destructive fire that had left many people homeless near the capital in Georgetown. To put it simply, this had seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. When election time came around next time, however, Crocket had a chance meeting in his home district with a farmer named Horatio Brunce. Mr. Brunce told him:
Colonel Crocket, seeing his error, replied: "...(I)f I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot..." And so, Crockett became a Mr. No. of his day. No doubt Crockett would be astounded at the way our nation has changed. He'd be aghast at the welfare state, the huge public debts, and the kinds of appropriations Congress passes during every session – almost all of them unconstitutional. Colonel Crocket was killed in 1836 (soon after leaving the legislature), while defending the Alamo in the Texas war of independence. Ironically, back in Washington, Crocket was being seriously considered by some Whig leaders as a presidential candidate for the national ticket for the election of that same year. John Q. Pridger WE HAD AMPLE WARNING OF WHAT HAS TRANSPIRED George Washington warned us against foreign entanglements and Thomas Jefferson admonished us about the dangers of standing armies and bankers. American troops are stationed in at least 130 foreign nations. We have two fairly big wars going on and a global war against terrorism. This is exactly what Washington and Jefferson warned against. We're in those 130 nations and those wars because "we can be," and we can be because we maintained a huge standing army when there should have been peace. Huge standing armies need something to do, and the Commander-In-Chief, and the corporate entities that have his ear, will find something for them to do. Thomas Jefferson said:
In the current housing and mortgage crisis, many Americans are destined to wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. Even as the super rich are beginning to founder, the richest few percentage points of the population already (and still), own most of the nation's capital and major real estate assets. And he told us:
The banks and their financial capital establishment, and the mega corporations that grew up around them, have proven Jefferson's every point. But our government, thinking it had perfected the art and science of Voodoo Economics, has found ways and means of expanding the public debt beyond the dreams of avarice – in order to purchase our comforts and shortchange reality. It did it by extending American financial system and its debt money to the entire world, expanding the limits of indebtedness far beyond the national boundaries, and beyond all rational boundaries. Our debt money system and it's extended system of debt finance have had their day. Greed overcame the wizards of finance, and their day should finally be over. It's time to take their toys away from them. Their toy is their franchise to create and control our money supply for their own profit, and play with the nation's credit markets as if they were merely their private casino. Today our children are taught that men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are just more tarnished "dead white men." But it's time we should begin listening to them. In 1977 our national debt reached $698 billion. It had taken our nation 201 years to accumulate that much debt. We had fought many wars, including two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, during that time. Today, 21 years later – 21 years of relative peace – the national debt (at almost $10 trillion), is over ten times that amount. Last Friday, the 3rd of October, 2008 Congress passed a $700 billion dollar emergency rescue bill! In one day of business Congress added more to the national debt than had accumulated during our first two centuries of national existence! This vast sum, which can only come from pure debt finance, was considered "just what the doctor ordered" in order to rescue the very financial system that brought us to this impasse in the first place. But it won't save the day. It's only a stopgap measure. The problem is much bigger than a "mere" $700 billion can remedy. Was the problem "democracy" – the very thing we are trying to bring to Iraq and Afghanistan? British Historian, Alexander Tytler said over 200 years ago: The executive branch is demonstrably making it's play for dictatorship under the guise of fighting terrorism. But the financial establishment that backs it is crumbling. The crisis is getting worse by the day as it becomes more and more apparent that our infection has the entire world grasping at straws in order to stay afloat. How it will play out is anybody's guess. We're at a great turning point in history. Will we opt to fix the problem, or merely find a means by which to perpetuate it? Both avenues are open, and both will be painful. Fixing the problem will be very painful in the short term and liberating in the long term. Perpetuating it will perhaps paper over some of the initial shock, but insure a long, painful decline – or until something really melodramatic happens. The Treasury is rolling out the bonds to hold some fuzzy liquidity line built on accelerated debt expansion. What it should be doing resurrecting and rolling out the good old greenback dollar – U.S. Notes – to solve the liquidity crisis with dollars rather than pure expanded debt. Federal Reserve money is "debt expansion money." Greenbacks are the peoples' money. It may be "fiat" money, and may be inflationary if mis-managed, but it doesn't increase public debt simply by being issued. John Q. Pridger Saturday, 4 October, 2008 SHOULD WE TRUST A "WINKER" AS VICE PRESIDENT? Of course, there's no question that Pridger will not vote for either Obama/Biden or McCain Palin. Both ticket represent too much of the status quote. Big government and plenty of B.S. (bovine secretions). If Pridger goes to the polls at all, it's going to have to be to vote for Ralph Nader or "none of the above." But Pridger likes Sarah Palin. She's a woman, and a pretty good looking one at that. She's certainly smart enough to fill the V.P. slot, and with enough coaching and advice, she could run the presidency. Little doubt about that. All that's really required is a warm articulate body. And she certainly appears to be well endowed in those particular lines. There's a lot of other things Pridger likes about Sarah as well. But Pridger was somewhat taken aback to observe that she is a prolific winker. In her debate with Joe Biden, she proved herself to be a master of the art – and this is a little disconcerting. Pridger thought back into his life in an attempt to remember the several times he's been winked at, and what the winks implied. It seems it usually meant that there was some sort of secret understanding between the winker and winkee – perhaps a little flippant conspiracy of sorts. It seems the only women who have ever winked at Pridger had some private activities in mind – something "others present" should not be privy to. Obviously, Mrs. Palin didn't mean it in that way. Another thing a wink means to Pridger is that he should not take whatever has been said by the winker too seriously. On the other hand, the winker sometimes wants to show that he or she perhaps knows a little more about the issues at hand than he or she is letting on. Maybe that's what Sarah Palin was really trying to convey. "Take what I say with a grain of salt. I really know what's going on, and you'll find out about it in due course. Trust me." The question is, do we really want to take that chance? They tell us that Joe Biden won the debate. And he never winked at the audience. He laid it all on the line, whereas Palin apparently kept some little secrets in reserve. Biden was more credible, at least to the media talking heads who go out of their way to analyze such things for us. Unfortunately, it's pretty difficult to judge a vice presidential candidate by what he or she says in a public debate or TV interview. Their primary job is to get their presidential running mate elected on that candidate's own platform – not the platform the vice president might in fact prefer. The VP candidate is expected to reflect the views and political agenda of the "boss." If any of the candidates really have meaningful formulae for real change, they can't afford to come clean with the public during election process. That would spell certain death at the hands of the media and powers that be. To actually have the solutions, and admit to them up front, means getting eliminated from the race early in the primaries, as was the case with Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Speaking of Kucinich, listen to his "Wake up America" speech at the Democratic National Convention and his views on the "Bail Out" package from MSNBC's Rachael Maddow http://www.kucinich.us/. While Pridger doesn't agree that the Democratic Party and an Obama administration are the answer, Dennis makes sense. At lot of sense – and he gives his views with the conviction and vigor of a man who should at the head of the Democratic ticket. John Q. Pridger
|
|||
|
|
|
|
vs.
The New
