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2010 DEC.
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TUESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER, 2010 47TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION Most of us old folks remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when President Kennedy was killed. Pridger was home in Illinois after being discharged from active service in the Navy, and preparing to head for California to seek his fortune as a civilian sailor. He heard the news while having a bite of lunch – noodle soup, to be exact – in a small restaurant. Then he visited the library, and heard the news again. The truth about the assassination has not yet been officially recognized, though more and more is coming out leading in that direction. Most of us don't believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. Not long ago, long-time CIA man, and Watergate "burglar," H. Howard Hunt made a startling confession on his death bed. He claimed he was part of the Big Event, and he was one of the few who had always claimed he did not exactly remember where he was on the 22nd of November, 1963. JQP WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? The Federal Reserve has become the largest holder of the U.S. national debt, and it's share is increasing. Should we look at this as an alarming development, as most do? Yes and no. The reason Pridger says yes and no is because we should all know that debt is bad, but at the same time we should certainly realize that debt to foreigners is far worse than owning the debt ourselves – or at least to an entity that is reputed to be a domestic national public asset such as the Federal Reserve System. The FED might be a banking cartel that fall considerably short of being "We the People," but at least it isn't China, Japan, or the European Union. The following graph and short article by Tyler Durden, published at Zero Hedge.com, calls our attention to what he points out as the "Beginning of the Ponzi End."
Is it better to be in debt to China, Japan, and the United Kingdom than to the Federal Reserve? From Pridger's perspective, when the "inevitable surge in interest rates finally happens" the less interest going to foreign debt-holders the better. American taxpayers are going to be caught on the hook no matter to whom or what the interest is payable. It's better for American taxpayers to be have to pay interest into their own system than into the coffers of foreign competitors, or offshore hedge funds. The statement that "That honor is now strictly reserved for American taxpayers" appears ridiculous. The honor goes to American taxpayers no matter who owns the debt! It's an unfortunate fact that the share of our debt owned by the Fed is money manufactured out of nothing for the benefit of domestic financial interests, and was largely created for nefarious purposes masquerading as economic stimulus. It is inflation money, of course, and the chairman of the Fed has admitted that higher inflation is part of the goal with QE2. But the money that is created by foreign purchases of Treasury bonds are inflationary in their own right, and the debt is external, thus more dangerous than if it was internal. Where is Germany in the above graph? Germany was once one of our major creditors. What happened, is Germany's creditor status now negligible? JQP FRIDAY, 19 NOVEMBER, 2010 INTERESTING THINGS ARE BREAKING Something interesting seems to be happening at FOX News. Judge Napolitano has been breaking ice for some time on his Liberty Watch. But with Geraldo Rivera suddenly tilting toward 9/11 Truth, and Glenn Beck going on the offensive against George Soros, one has to wonder what is going on. Both of these things are quite surprising, and possibly very significant. Could this mean that Fox News is going to begin outing the deceivers? If so, what is really going on? Are all of the elements of a perfect storm coalescing? Could a simmering volcano of suppressed truth soon erupt and infect the entire nation? We'll have to stay tuned for the answers. The other big deal is the big hoopla being made over TSA's full body scanners and enhanced, and very intimate, pat-down security procedures. Things like this tend to follow a well established pattern. Draconian measures are initiated in the name of security, and soon then they are relaxed – but never back to former levels. Keeping us safe? Where will it end up? Everybody knows the safest place is a locked padded room. Next best thing is a fenced camp, to keep the crazies out. Like tyranny, the security state always advances and never gives up. Any retreats are ruses to further the advance later on. Pridger observed soon after 9/11 that we'd entered into the perfect security state situation. We'd embarked on an open-ended global war against "terrorism" – an exceedingly slippery term. They'd finally contrived the perfect formula and excuse for "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace." Naturally, every man, woman, and child in the world capable of terrorist acts, or potentially subject to being used by terrorists, is a potential terrorist suspect. And under our present multi-cultural social arrangement that declares discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin, etc., illegal, racial profiling based on those obvious things are illegal. That means it's illegal to target the most likely suspects for enhanced security checks. That's a hell of a situation for any land of freedom and liberty to find itself in. In the name of national security, every man, woman, and child is being treated as a terrorist suspect in our airports. The whole nation is becoming fed up with it. If 95% of the terrorists happen to be Arab Muslims, it becomes necessary to subject everybody – ALL men, women, and children, of every race, religion, and national background – to the very same degree of scrutiny and security screening that Arab Muslims should perhaps be subjected to. We can't profile Arab Muslims, so we must treat everybody as if they were Arab Muslims. We're reacting to the "underwear bomber" and "ink-toner" bombs at the moment. Before that it was the "shoe bomber." Before that it was the "chemical bomber." Before that it was the threat of "sharp objects," like box-cutters (knives, hat pins, fingernail files, scissors, pens, pencils, etc.). Who knows what will be next? Maybe the "breast implant" or "colon" bombers. The next security step might be full body cat scans. Opt out and you get an enema flush-out, or at least a colonoscophy and stomach probe. With literally everybody a potential terrorist suspect, causing us to spend billions upon billions of dollars on airport security, the real terrorists (whether in Afghan caves or corporate suites), have already won a major battle, simply by instilling fear and helping Congress bankrupt the nation. In the mean time the "authorities" go out of their way to entice stupid young Muslims to become bombers so they can catch them in order to prove that there is a real threat and that they are keeping us safe. OPT OUT – DRIVE – OR TAKE A BUS OR TRAIN! Of course, Pridger flies just as little as possible. In fact, he hasn't boarded an aircraft in over 30 years. He's always believed, as in the case of most wonderful ultra-modern things, that air-travel has been totally over-promoted and over-done. It makes what was once a wonderfully large and diverse world embarrassingly small and increasingly homogenous and less interesting. Because of the increasing demands for airport security, there is no longer any real market correlation between the actual costs of flying and what fliers pay for their tickets. The air travel industry no longer pays it's own way (if it ever did). This, of course, is anti-free market. Without huge subsidies, for such things as airport infrastructure, air-traffic control people and systems, security screening, etc., the air travel industry would have to charge passengers a lot more and perhaps shrink to more reasonable levels. Maybe international travelers would be able to travel by ship again. The cruise ship industry might be able to transform itself from focusing exclusively on pointless "party package cruises" into meaningful travel companies – carrying passengers to all points of the world – real travel, for real travelers who are not in a hurry. IMAGINE THIS... All air passengers – hundreds of millions of them – are being screened before boarding airliners in the name of national security. This sort of security has been going on for a long time. It's just getting tighter, more invasive, more high tech, and more degrading to air-travelers – not to mention exponentially more costly! Yet the only alleged terrorist bombers that have been caught have been the very few that got through airport security. Many suspect that those who did get through got through (with help) for a purpose – that purpose being to ratchet up of public anxiety, and perhaps to justify enhanced security measures, which are very lucrative to certain business interests as well as fertilizer for the growth of the national security state. They are talking about the same sort of security procedures for buses and trains as time goes on. But by far the easiest terrorist targets are not airplanes, buses, or trains. They are cities! It happened on 9/11, of course, in a very spectacular, made for reality TV, way. Airliners were used to make it as spectacular as possible – as if the script was actually written and acted out, Hollywood style, by sophisticated script writers. Some people believe it was written that way, for maximum effect. The question is, by whom? Osama? Unlikely. One thing we can be quite certain of is that it wasn't Obama. But the ideal terrorist bomb is the simple, universally available, automobile. Millions of trucks and cars enter every large city in a continuous stream day and night. The truck and car bomb, with a single suicide driver, are potentially the most effective terrorist devices of all – and they would certainly be the easiest to carry out. In fact we had a dry run of something like that with the Times Square bomber only a couple of months ago, but the driver got out and ran. Imagine security checkpoints at every interstate, highway, or street, entering every major city! Imagine literally everybody entering a city being stopped and having to get out of their vehicles for a pat-down or body scan. That's what it would take for them (the government), to "keep us safe." Cities might be an increment safer, but they'd also be totally paralyzed. Bringing down a jet airliner would only kill a few hundred people. Taking out a couple more huge buildings with a simple car or truck bomb could do a lot more. And a biological agent laden bomb could take out a lot more. A nuclear device could potentially wipe out even more. They're talking about that scenario, of course, and have been for quite a while – but the terrorists, or they (whoever they might be), haven't pulled the big one off yet. Let's pray that they don't. But they are talking about it. IDEAS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY Quit the wars, and bring our troops home. Quit trying to run the world. De-fund and abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Stop arming foreign friends and enemies. Cut foreign AID back to humanitarian aid. Stop subsidizing the foreign competition and runaway flag "American" corporations. Start producing domestically again and cut international trade down to a truly beneficial level. Stop aborting American children and importing foreign replacements. Encourage sustainable diversified agricultural practices based on the the family farm system. Enforce our immigration laws. Fences aren't the solution for our southern border. There isn't a fence that cannot be scaled, tunneled under, or flown over. Huge concrete fences at borders are Communist and Israeli solutions and are unworthy of a nation that purports to be a bastion of freedom. Stop destroying Mexican and third world farmers and small businesses with our "free trade." If they need help from us, it should be to assist them to develop an industrial capacity that produces for Mexicans rather than for Americans. Uplift Mexican labor within Mexico, and a more prosperous Mexican economy will evolve – as once happened in the United States. Stop the War on Drugs, legalize and control drugs internally, and wipe out the international illicit drug trade through lack of interest rather than by bombs, prisons, and bullets. Drugs are blamed for many social problems but, in reality, illicit drug use is mostly the result of social problems, which are in turn largely caused by the collapse of the culture and traditional norms of morality. The Drug Wars have done nothing to reverse the causes nor provide a remedy for the drug problems. It has merely empowered international drug lords and enabled a very lucrative illicit international drug trade – a problem that is literally destroying our neighbor to the south. Completely legalize marijuana, since it is the least dangerous recreational drug and simply a weed that can be grown anywhere by anybody anyway. Additionally, it is a very valuable agricultural crop with dozen's of commercial applications from rope to fine paper and textiles, to biomass for alternative fuels. Just control and tax it's commercial sale as a "recreational drug," as alcoholic beverages are taxed and controlled. The Drug War is not only destroying Mexico, it's helping to destroy us – and at great financial cost at that. JQP MONDAY, 15 NOVEMBER, 2010 THE SIN OF QUANTITATIVE EASING What's wrong with what is being called quantitative easing? Why is the act of monetizing the debt bad, when everybody knows that all of our money is already monetized debt anyway? The simple answer is that it amounts to "self-dealing" and cheating at our own global game – a game that the rest of the world is obliged to play because our currency is the international reserve currency – the very yardstick against which all market values and foreign currencies are measured. Our cheating is worse than simply self-dealing. The money being quantatized is going into the black holes the big banks have created rather than into the real economy. The FED is simply refilling the black holes of corruption. In the name of the taxpayer (no, they don't even pretend to represent the taxpayer!), our central bank is buying bad corporate bonds so the the corporate manipulators don't have to suffer their rightful losses! SOME BACKGROUND The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945. But the government of the United States set itself up as the global money-master/paymaster before the end of World War Two, when victory was obviously at hand. It happened at the United Nations Monetary and Financial (Bretton Woods), Conference, in July of 1944). (Note that FDR started calling the allies the "United Nations" in the early war years.) The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), all came out of the Bretton Woods Conference, where globalist plans first took solid root in monetary and trade terms. British economist, John Maynard Keynes, at that time proposed an International Clearing Union (ICU) to regulate the balance of trade, as well as an international trade currency he called the "bancor." These proposals may have helped to avoid the problems that we face today with both the major balance of trade problems and the dollar crisis. Keynesian economics is often blamed for many of our present economic problems (since our government long ago adopted Keynesian deficit spending ideas), but that is perhaps mainly because we adopted the worst of his policies while rejecting the ones that might have worked on an international scale, or at least made the overall system work better than it has. The American government, in the fresh glory of victory and unchallenged global power, rejecting Keynes's plan, preferring to make sure it would remain top dog. And one of the means that it would employ would to make the dollar the global reserve currency. Lionel Robbins, a London School of Economics free market economist, said of the Keynes plan, "it would be difficult to exaggerate the electrifying effect on thought throughout the whole relevant apparatus of government ... nothing so imaginative and so ambitious had ever been discussed". But American delegate, Harry Dexter White, said, "We have been perfectly adamant on that point. We have taken the position of absolutely no."
Obviously, though it worked for half a century, all of this has come back to bite us on the backside with the inevitable unintended consequences. In 1944-45 (and a long time prior to that), and until the early 1980s, we were the world's largest creditor nation. We were also the world's most industrially productive nation, and the world's largest exporting nation. We had a favorable balance of trade that lasted through the 1960s, and when we began to lose that, our fortunes really began to decline. With the advent of the welfare state while the costly Vietnam War was underway, it soon became necessary to adopt the worst of Keynesian economic policy while being unable to shelter ourselves from the very nature of our debt money system. The Bretton Woods system was fatally flawed, of course, but it apparently took until about 1960 for any noted economist to point it out. In that year, Robert Triffin testified before the U.S. Congress, sounding the warning:
Aside from the international aspect of our currency, any debt money system is a both a usurious system and Ponzi scheme. As such, it requires perpetual expansion in order to function. That means that business has to perpetually expand in order to cover financial costs plus interest. There can be no such thing as equilibrium, stability, or sustainability. It means that the money supply must expand ahead of production and all business activity rather than grow because of it. So we had an endemically unsustainable global monetary system. Every dollar created spawned a dollar, plus interest, debt. Additionally, with the dollar serving as the global reserve currency, it had to be expanded globally in order to sustain increasing international business and commerce. (Initially, the Marshall Plan and other forms of foreign aid facilitated this. Subsequent wars did their share too, of course.) Bretton Woods, of course, depended upon a gold-backed dollar. By 1959, however, money began to exceed the amount of the gold that was supposed to back it. And the gold standard finally had to be totally abolished. It was clearly impossible for one nation, no matter how prosperous (unless it happened to have a near monopoly on gold production), to provide a global currency under a gold standard – and that should have been obvious from the very beginning! In 1969, in preparation for that eventuality, the IMF created Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as an alternative global reserve currency, or at least trade currency. Initially SDRs were expressed as a weight of gold (0.888671 grams of gold), equal to the U.S. dollar at that time. Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, a basket of the major global currencies have been used. So Nixon was obliged to abandon the international gold standard, and slam the "gold window" in 1971 – a major repudiation of our international reserve currency commitment, and an effective declaration of national bankruptcy. After a painful global shake-out, with all currencies seeking new relationships, floating against the dollar, the dollar survived as the global reserve currency and SDRs were little used. The world was hooked on the dollar standard – a very flaky standard – and could do nothing about it. It was madness to make our national currency the global reserve currency in the first place. We were thereby bound to lose effective control of our national economy in the fullness of time – in fact, we'd already lost control. But once free trade and globalism really began to take off, all hope of controlling our currency for the national benefit was history. Our commitment to free international trade (an ideal born at Bretton Woods), and the resultant problem is partially explained by the Triffin dilemma) – yet all the experts told us it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened.
Now the tables are totally turned and we have fallen victim of our own monetary and trade policies. We're now the world's largest debtor nation, with the largest trade deficit any nation has ever had. With a debt money system that has come to depend on foreign creditors to make legitimate, we're caught in a deadly trap of our own making. From the 1980s until the present, our major financial institutions have progressively gone the extra mile to exponentially compound or economic problems under the cover of "too big to fail." We've dropped the ball in so many ways, and engaged in too many economically and financially suicidal policies that there is no longer much comfort in the idea that "no matter how much debt the US accumulates, its economy will not collapse". Our economy is in collapse anyway. Our only defensive options are to continually borrow and debase our currency – a frightening box canyon with no way to go forward. The destruction of the American economy was accomplished by de-industrialization, intentionally facilitated and encouraged by free trade policy and globalism – i.e., self-destructive national economic policy. It is impossible to imagine that this has not been intentional, and thus the result of a de facto conspiracy, at critical levels. The errors were simply far too obvious to have simply have been overlooked – they had to be vigorously protected and promoted! For many decades, successive congresses and presidential administrations have been led down the primrose path to national economic destruction by somebody or something. It wasn't strictly a case of the blind leading the blind. Somebody, pulling all the right stings, knew exactly where all this was leading us and saw the goals very clearly. So, in our present confused state, we change the rules at the end-game in a desperate effort to salvage an already wrecked train. Printing money (quantitative easing), is being done in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. But it's about the only thing that can be done from the perspective of the financial interests that are running the show. But in so doing, we are debasing the world's currency which is denominated in our own national debt for which the American taxpayer is supposedly liable as the world continues to depend on it. We're in the mother of all "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations – headed for the edge of the cliff with our hands tied. The world went along with our monetary regime because it had no other easy options, and still doesn't in the short term. But the only international legitimacy the debt dollar had was that it was founded on marketable securities which were supposed to be as good as gold in the bank. Treasury paper was supposed to be purchased by viable creditors, and the promise to repay, plus interest, gave the resultant money international legitimacy. But is the Federal Reserve a viable creditor? The world doesn't seem to think so, and quantitative easing is correctly viewed as monetary debasement – otherwise known as outright cheating. It looks a little fishy, to say the least, when the right hand prints bonds and the left hand prints money to loan back to the right hand at interest. And then the right hand spends the money it still owes to the left hand. This is the epitome of smoke and mirror monetary policy in the guise of self-dealing. And its costing our "legitimate" creditors dearly while making them look like fools for investing in our so-called "bonded securities."
With our monopoly on the global reserve currency, we were unassailable only as long as we were a great and expanding wealth-producing nation with a favorable balance of trade. We could be a credible debtor as long as our ability to produce wealth allowed us to keep all our creditors happy. Once we began to lag industrially, a Catch-22 situation developed – an impossible situation. When we lost our former enviable position, and subsequently lost our position of being the world's biggest creditor, and became the world's biggest debtor, we took comfort, in the theory that our huge un-payable debt to the world conveyed de facto ownership of the world. Like Bear Stearns, we imagined ourselves too big to fail and still do. But humble pie could be in the offing. China has become the big wild card in the deck. It has risen (with our concerted assistance), like a meteor to become our primary industrial producer and creditor. It makes things! Chinese workers are producing lots and lots of real wealth, and they are making and saving plenty of money. They are literally running rings around us! And (big surprise!), with our economic down-turn, the Chinese economy is poised to overtake the American economy in size much sooner than anybody dreamed. It fact, China has probably already surpassed the United States in real production. It became our largest creditor several years ago, and militarily is already a rival super-power. While we now beg China for credit, and attempt to get it to revalue it's currency upward, our quantitative easing, is a direct slap in China's face, and China probably doesn't like being made a fool of. Could anybody blame it? Of course, we're saying that China is trying to make a fool of us, by keeping their own currency artificially low. But, really, we've simply made a fool of ourselves. We actually insisted on it, and we were very glad to take advantage of China's cheap labor. China pegged its currency to the dollar at the very beginning of the game – our leaders were ecstatic – and China delivered the goods! WalMart is thriving! While we accuse China of manipulating it's own national currency, we are manipulating the world's currency by inflating and debasing its purchasing power, and this impacts everybody that holds dollar assets, not just China. And this is why quantitative easing is considered such a bad thing. This willful inflation of the currency will particularly impact poor Americans, and those on fixed retirement incomes. And the debt that is incurred in the process will continue to impact American taxpayers for generations to come! If they come. The rationale that the Treasury and Fed give for inflating the currency – the threat of deflation – is a deception. It is also obviously an ill-begotten and underhanded attempt to improve our competitive trade position. But it won't help much in that respect. We don't have much to sell these days, and our production costs would have to be cut far below what American labor could accept to tempt many Chinese purchasers. True, a few very rich Chinese are buying American cars. But that's an exception that will not develop into a rule. Yes, there may be deflation in the financial sector, since it has operated huge auxiliary Ponzi schemes that have imploded, but the real American economy is in depression as people are experiencing joblessness, home loss, and price inflation. The black holes that the Fed wants to fund and fill are the phantom economies that have brought our system into crisis – those created by the "too big to fails." The Fed has been a major facilitator of the phantom, or shadow, economy and the creation of the great multi-faceted financial crisis, and it's efforts thus far have been to refund the Ponzi schemes to make them viable again for a while – an economically suicidal effort. MAKING A SOW'S EAR OUT OF A SILK PURSE At the time of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the United States was on top of the world. The dollar was alleged, and pledged, to be as good as gold. The victorious allies of Europe, in the wake of the most disastrously destructive war in the history of mankind, embraced it. Since then we have defaulted on our gold pledge (1971 – much less due to faulty monetary policy than war policy and fiscal irresponsibility on the part of successive Congresses), the world has been forced to embrace a purely fiat dollar debt standard. The world didn't like it, but there was little that could be done to avoid it. We were still the preeminent world power in literally every way. We were still the richest, most productive, most militarily powerful, nation in the world. We were the world's greatest exporting economy, the world's greatest creditor, and the free world's greatest all-around benefactor. And we had the richest and most coveted market in the world. All of this in spite of decades of increasing congressional deficit spending. When gold was removed from the American monetary system, the "full faith and credit" of the United States government and its peoples became the only backing of the global currency. The system worked as long as American economy was robust. Most of the debt that backed the dollar was paid for by America's amazingly productive industrial economy. The debt behind the currency was largely internal debt. But that could not last for a global currency and an increasingly globalized economy. The nation operated at a net profit, with a positive balance of payments and favorable balance of trade, producing much more wealth than it imported. Treasury bonds sold into the marketplace to unleash money were largely purchased by American financial institutions, businesses, and individuals circa 1940s. Though the Treasury bond market was international, the popular fiction that "we owed the debt to ourselves" was at least true to significantly degree. "Ourselves" didn't quite mean "we the people" however. It mostly meant "We, Wall Street and the big bankers, and a few foreign central banks." The Federal Reserve System has always been a Ponzi scheme, but it was a low-key Ponzi scheme until the post WWII era, that would work and be sustainable as long as the nation itself operated on a profitable basis and national production and income continued to expand. Korea hurt, but the Cold War and the Vietnam War were killers. Many straws were braking the camel's back by then, breaking the system, and finally forcing the United States to repudiate it's gold-backed currency. The nation was still producing, but government had begun spending more than it could afford, running large deficits, and accumulating a huge debt. And, as we have seen, this situation became institutionalized and intentional. The full-blown welfare state immerged during the Vietnam War and forced deficit hyper-spending that would have proven unsustainable in any free-market society, putting the monetary Ponzi scheme onto ever-thinner ice. But, when the gold-stop was removed – removing the main source of fiscal and monetary discipline from the equation – Congress lost all fiscal sanity. It's main fiscal function became to spend, spend, spend, stopping periodically to raise the debt ceiling to keep from bumping and bruising their heads. As a result, our nation's fortunes declined and went into reverse during the early Reagan years. We went from being the world's biggest creditor nation to the world's greatest debtor nation. The administration rejoiced in the good news that we were becoming a nation of servants (a service economy), "knowledge workers," and financial speculators. Business boomed, but it was not the business of producing wealth. It was the business of shuffling and concentrating it. The gutting of the economy went into high gear amidst the great Reagan business prosperity. Cannibalization and corporate collectivization, of theretofore profitable domestic businesses, came into vogue. The terms "hostile take-over" became familiar, as did the runaway flag corporation. Globalism (which had been waiting in the wings for a long time), was at hand. We produced less and needed to import increasingly more, as the era of free trade was whooped up as the most positive thing that could possibly contribute to our prosperity. In spite of an era of little warfare during the last two decades of the twentieth century, deficit spending continued to increase at an alarming rate. It was impossible for Reagan to balance the budget as promised. It was found that it was impossible to kill or reduce government programs. The best that could be hoped for was to arrest their growth somewhat. To "cut the budget" became to "slow the growth of government spending" – never to actually cut anything! So nothing resulted in a decrease in spending. Spending always went up. And now the "upright spike" has arrived! After "We owe it to ourselves" became passé as an excuse to be deeply in debt, it became "Our debt level doesn't matter as long as business is expanding." Conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh finally fell, hook, line, and sinker, for that one. But the great business expansion was of the wrong variety. It was money shuffling expansion rather than the expansion of wealth creating productive enterprise. Actual wealth production was actually being exported to others elsewhere. SO, HERE WE ARE! Our entire money supply consists of monetized debt. And when we became a debtor nation, we could no longer fund our own debt, and the global money supply was increasingly dependent on the sales of Treasury bonds to foreign banks, financial institutions, and other international investors. The dollar was the world's reserve currency, and and current account and trade deficits were the only way to get the dollars out where they were needed! International trade began increasing exponentially, with the United States being the major market. American industrial capital was given license to flee the flag and produce elsewhere in order to develop other markets and increase profits on Wall Street. Systemic national economic suicide became entrenched national economic policy. As the national debt grew, it was increasingly taken up by foreign investors who had an increasing stake in the American economy – every dollar in foreign circulation was a claim against it. But the system was upside down and destructive to United States interests, and, ultimately, to everybody else playing the game as well. The international monetary Ponzi scheme reached a critical point, and many bubbles began to burst in 2007-8 and until today. Our debt went into hyper-overdrive. Our creditors began to get nervous about the biggest bubble of all – the exponentially expanding American deficit and national debt. They'd lost faith in what had become an obviously corrupt system. It makes little sense to invest in what appears, even to the untrained eye, to be an ongoing train wreck. So, if our entire money supply consists of monetized debt anyway, how can quantitative easing be considered so bad? What's the difference? Quantitative easing is "self-dealing" for self-interests in a monetary system that we've effectively tricked the world into accepting, requiring it to play according to the rules we set up. We're breaking the rules, to the detriment of all of our creditors and all of the people of the world that hold dollar assets, and our own already tarnished credibility. It's that simple. There is, however, one advantage to quantitative easing as opposed to selling our debt to foreign central banks. While quantitative easing increases the national debt, it at least does not increase the foreign component of the debt – and it is the foreign component of the national debt that is, and is going to continue to be, our major problem when it finally becomes necessary to engage in some sort of serious monetary reform and balancing of accounts. If we owed all of our debt to the Fed, we could almost once again say that "We owe it to ourselves," but that time has past. In the final analysis, all of our money is based on nothing more than "the full faith and credit of the nation." If we had a strictly national currency of our own, we could loan ourselves enough money to revive our economy. (And we would never have got into the fixe we find ourselves in, in the first place!) But we have hamstrung ourselves by using an international bank cartel dollar. We don't just owe it to ourselves, but to the world – and that is an extraordinarily difficult situation to be in. Without serious monetary reform, and a return to national currencies issued by national treasuries rather than international banks, whatever we do will have to be wrong. JQP SUNDAY, 14 NOVEMBER, 2010 BLEEPING OBSCENE NATION!
It isn't just prime time TV. Oddly enough, Pridger listens to Public Radio quite a bit because of the often interesting variety of programming, including classical music and bluegrass. But in recent years, Pridger hears more and more things he'd rather not hear on PBS, and finds himself frequently switching the radio off. Increasingly, talk show interviews honor guests whose words of wisdom have to be bleeped out – and the host laughs and apparently thinks it's wonderful. Such programs as "Fresh Air" have fallen into this category. Fresh Air? "Adult language" has come to PBS in a big way, though it is still bleeped out. This is a scandal – or it should be. Garrison Keillor's delightful, and once completely wholesome, Prairie Home Companion is now liberally peppered with fart jokes – Keillor apparently loves fart jokes – and sexual innuendo these days. It's an outrage, but the audience laughs and applauds on queue. It isn't just language. We have become the VIAGRA NATION! Viagra and Cialis sexual enhancement commercials are all over network and cable television, prime time and otherwise. What does this tell us about our culture? And what does it tell our kids? At the same time we have fixated on sex offenders as the most abominable class of offenders, whose crimes are never forgiven or forgotten, no matter how petty the offense or how many years have been served as punishment. Mere murderers and major bank robbers don't have to register once their time has been served, but the sex offender is never free. They are considered almost in a class with convicted terrorists. Yet our very culture has come to be a huge sex and porn marketing machine, sold in movies and prime-time commercials. Perhaps Clinton's X-rated presidential administration had something to do with the liberalization of the airways. We're in the midst of national moral bankruptcy, and the correlation with corporate corruption, financial collapse, and national monetary bankruptcy are not just coincidental. It appears that it's all part of the same comprehensive program. Today we decry the double standards of former times. But in the old days the majority society always strove toward higher moral ideals. There was plenty of hypocrisy, of course, but people attempted to at least have a civilized moral veneer. The figurative red light district was always kept in the background. But now the red light district and porn industries are right up front in everybody's living rooms, and the whole culture has been downgraded toward gutter standards. There are still plenty of double or triple standards, but now the lines between good and bad, moral and immoral, have been blurred. And the moral standards of the base culture has been lowered almost to zero. While it's okay for everybody to have the moral standards of prostitutes and johns – honest prostitution remains illegal. Society tells us, "By all means do it at every opportunity! But don't do it as an honest business transaction!" Immorality has become almost universally persuasive at all levels of society, business, and government – and, obviously, it is bringing the whole system down. JQP
October 3, 2010 GIVE US PROTECTION AND PROSPERITY! Protectionism is considered heresy today, but look where free trade has gotten us so far! We're literally up a creek without a paddle – or more accurately, down the river! Our nation – the richest nation in the world – is no longer able to pay its own way in the world! Everybody knows we have a serious problem, but nobody is looking at the source of the problem. No politician or news commentator has the guts to state the obvious. What is obvious is that our national marketplace has been given away. The national marketplace is synonymous with the national economy, and if the management does not protect that market in the interests of the owner-operators – if it allows others to invade and take over that marketplace – profits will no longer accrue to the rightful owners. Unemployment sill soar. This is what is happening, and it is why the once most productive nation in the world is no longer productive enough to supply its own basic necessities, and must borrow to finance it's consumption and living standards. These are the fruits of free trade – which is neither free nor cheap – and it's not as if nobody ever told us. Here's a political speech from over a century ago, and it needs to be given in the halls of Congress once again!
GIVE US PROTECTION AND PROSPERITY!Give us Protection and Prosperity! Do not cheat us with free trade dreams! JQP All quotations and excerpts are based on non-profit "fair use" in the greater public interest consistent with the understanding of laws noted at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html.
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