FedUpUSA

Archive for October 6th, 2011

There are days I’m embarrassed to say I ever called myself a conservative.  This would be one of them.  It’s  pathetic that it takes a comedian to point out what should be obvious to all of us. It is disgusting to see those who advocate upholding the Constitution of this country but deny its 1st Amendment protected rights to all but themselves.  Yes, the hypocrisy is deafening.

Think whatever you want to about the Occupy movements, gobble up the pablum served to you by the main stream media if you will, but you suffer from rectal-cranial inversion if you deny these people their right to speak out peacefully and you’re nothing but a disgusting human being if you cheer the authorities for assaulting any of the peaceful demonstrators.  It was not that long ago there was a certain Tea Party livid at the cries of ‘astroturf,’ ‘Nazi,’ and ‘racist,’ yet there are Tea Partiers who now do that to others.  I think America needs a long hard look in the mirror….but I’ll let Jon Stewart give you a glimpse of that reflection.

We face an enemy common to all Americans: The capture of our government by the private institutions that create our money. It will take all of us setting aside personal and ideological agendas to defeat this corruption.  We had better find common ground before what we have known as the ‘American dream’ is gone forever.

STOP THE LOOTING & START PROSECUTING!

Libertarians Support Wall Street Protest to End the Fed

Ron Paul says that the Wall Street protests are legitimate, and that they are really protesting against the Federal Reserve.

One of the protest organizers tells me that a large proportion of the protesters are Ron Paul supporters. Most of them believe that ending the Federal Reserve is the most important step to restore our country’s prosperity. See this and this.

Remember, even the Wall Street Journal has called for the Fed to be broken up.

As I have extensively documented, the Fed is largely responsible for the economic crisis, and has failed to meet a single one of its stated mandates (let alone its implied ones).

The Fed has been enabler-in-chief for the corruption rampant on Wall Street.

And as I noted Tuesday:

Some very well-known economists also support ending the Fed.

For example, Milton Friedman said:

This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System… and that the severity of each of the major contractions —
1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities…

 

Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank…

To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to
the central bankers.

Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard also would like to end the Fed:

Given this dismal monetary and banking situation, given a 39:1 pyramiding of checkable deposits and currency on top of gold, given a Fed unchecked and out of control, given a world of fiat moneys, how can we possibly return to a sound noninflationary market money? The objectives, after the discussion in this work, should be clear: (a) to return to a gold standard, a commodity standard unhampered by government intervention; (b) to abolish the Federal Reserve System and return to a system of free and competitive banking; (c) to separate the government from money; and (d) either to enforce 100 percent reserve banking on the commercial banks, or at least to arrive at a system where any bank, at the slightest hint of nonpayment of its demand liabilities, is forced quickly into bankruptcy and liquidation. While the outlawing of fractional reserve as fraud would be preferable if it could be enforced, the problems of enforcement, especially where banks can continually innovate in forms of credit, make free banking an attractive alternative.

Congressmen Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich have introduced bills to abolish the Fed.

And as I noted last week, most Americans want the Fed ended or at least reined in:

At least 75% of the American people want a full audit of the Fed, and most
were against reconfirming Bernanke.

Indeed, as Bloomberg noted last December:

A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s independent central bank, saying the U.S. Federal Reserve should either be brought under tighter political control or abolished outright, a poll shows.

***

Americans across the political spectrum say the Fed shouldn’t retain its current structure of independence. Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.

As I have extensively documented, the Fed is largely responsible for the economic crisis, and has failed to meet a single one of its stated mandates (let alone its implied ones).

Indeed, the Founding Fathers despised the British central bank, and said that the right to create their own credit and currency was one of the core battles in the Revolutionary
War.

Obama Is Not the Answer

Libertarians also point out that – while the Obama campaign and Democratic National Committee are trying to hijack the Wall Street protests – they have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

They point out that Obama has appointed Wall Street insiders to all of his key economic posts, and accepted more money from Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks than anyone
else (and is still raking it in). As such, despite his populist rhetoric, he’s with Wall Street, not the protesters. Indeed, he is Wall Street.

They point out that Obama has continued the process of turning the U.S. into a banana republic, and whether you call it communism, fascism or crony capitalism, Obama has been at least as bad as Bush.

They point out that Obama has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who thinks high levels of unemployment are good.

They point out that Obama has been more brutal than Bush and has destroyed our liberties
even faster than Bush.

For these reasons, libertarians correctly state that re-electing Obama is not the answer. And they note that Ron Paul’s consistent, decades-long positions are much closer to the American peoples’ demands than Obama’s.

Postscript: Anyone who still thinks Obama will save us is high.

On the other hand, libertarians have been out of power for a long time. Neoliberals and Neoconservatives – two masks on a single face of corruption – have been in the driver’s seat for
decades. Libertarians should welcome the protests as a chance to challenge the status quo, to promote liberty and to end the Fed – the chief enabler of corruption in our country today.

Folks dismissing the Occupy protests as being Obama propaganda or left-wing haven’t yet learned the facts, are blaming the fact that the mainstream Democratic party is trying to infiltrate the movement on the protesters, or are letting Fox, Drudge or other mainstream news sources blow a sub-set of the overall protests out of proportion. See this, this and this.   Indeed, as the Associated Press notes, the protesters are fed up with BOTH mainstream parties.

ZeroHedge

Answer: Whoever wants it bad enough.

I caught a lot of flack from my conservative readers over my article suggesting that left and right should come together on the issue of the banking oligarchy. I pointed out that the only president to break the power of the banking elites in America was Andrew Jackson, a democrat, and that ironically, the Tea Party – the antithesis of Democrat ideology – now sounded more like Jackson than any prominent Democrat politicians or writers.

But the elephant in the room was the Occupy Wall Street movement’s apparent link to ACORN, and hence to our far left administration.

I knew about the ACORN link when I wrote the article. In fact, it seems Obama’s favorite Maoist Van Jones also may well be linked to the movement.

All of this is very bad indeed, and there has never been a leftist-organized movement that has been successfully used to the advantage of the right or of constitutionally minded Americans before.

But if my hunch is correct, and if God is with us (or in other words, if we deserve a break in God’s eyes), the Obama camp may be in for a surprise.

You see, there are two separate and opposite narratives going on in this same movement.

The narrative of the group that thought it was in charge is figuring prominently in New York City, blaming Wall Street and capitalism in general, never mind that Big Business is no longer governed by free market capitalist rules but by a series of machinations based on a government-business alliance, known as corporatism (or as fascism by the less charitable).  A perfect example was Apple, headed by the recently deceased Steve Jobs. Around the last elections, about 91% of Jobs’ political donations went to the Democrats, who openly oppose the free market, while the other 9% went to the GOP, which at least pays lip service to the free market. So what does that tell you?

A free market ideology is virtually absent from Big Business today, as though the captains of industry were in a hurry to see their own demise. It is nothing short of surreal.

However, the narrative of the group that is rapidly assuming control of the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere does indeed support free market principles. Many of these people seem to be coming from Ron Paul’s vast network, and they can be described as independents and libertarians, who, as you know, draw their intellectual sustenance from the free market enthusiasts of the Austrian School, and from Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and the like, and, for whatever faults they may have, they loathe leftist Statism as much as Obama and fellow travelers love it.

According to Asia Times, far from calling for more government intervention to tax the rich, the new (and growing) narrative is a call “to end the banking cartel’s hold on Washington.”

This is a narrative not supported by either party. The GOP likes the corporatism behind the banking oligarchy’s power, which it is desperately trying to continue passing off as “capitalism” and “free market principles.” Likewise, the Democrats like corporatism because it brings money into their private and public coffers with generous donations from corporate fat cats who know that staying on the good side of the Dems will pay big dividends for them, and likewise, that failing to fawn all over these socialists will bring down a torrent of regulator interventions as it did on Gibson Guitar Corp., threatening to drive them out of business.

Probably the last best representatives of free market capitalism are to be found under H in the phone book: Handymen. These men are part of what used to be called the black market in the Soviet Union.

They pay little or no taxes, they hire no one and they are all but invisible to government.

We can only hope that our free market is soon restored to the point that the little guy, including the handyman, can at least dream of working his way into business ownership again, through hard work, creativity, intelligence and a benevolent, laissez-faire government that has no plans either to entangle him in an unholy alliance with it or to squash him like a bug simply for being independent and giving Americans – not Chinese or Mexicans or anyone else — jobs.

There’s a movement out there that started out for the purpose of further destroying sound American economic principles. But in the right hands, this same movement, with a narrative change, could very well bring us back to the free market, over the protests of the hapless left.

It’s ours for the taking.

Donald Hank – Laigles Forum

We are getting so close to a financial collapse in Europe that you can almost hear the debt bubbles popping.  All across the western world, governments and major banks are rapidly becoming insolvent.  So far, the powers that be are keeping all of the balls in the air by throwing around lots of bailout money.  But now the political will for more bailouts is drying up and the number of troubled entities seems to grow by the day.  Right now the western world is facing a debt crisis that is absolutely unprecedented in world history.  Europe has had a tremendously difficult time just trying to keep Greece afloat, and several much larger European countries are now on the verge of a major financial crisis.  In addition, there is a growing number of very large financial institutions all over the western world that are also rapidly approaching a day of reckoning.  The global financial system is a sea or red ink, and when we get to the point where there are hundreds of ships going under how is it going to be possible to bail all of them out?  The quotes that you are about to read show that quite a few top financial and political insiders know that things cannot hold together much longer and that a horrific economic crisis is coming.  We built the global financial system on a foundation of debt, leverage and risk and now this house of cards that we have created is about to come tumbling down.

A lot of people in politics and in the financial world know what is about to happen.  Once in a while they will even be quite candid about it with the media.

As I have written about previously, Europe is on the verge of a financial collapse.  If things go really badly, things could totally fall apart in a few weeks.  But more likely it will be a few more months until the juggling act ends.

Right now, the banking system in Europe is coming apart at the seams.  Because the global financial system is so interconnected today, when major European banks start to fail it is going to have a cascading effect across the United States and Asia as well.

The financial crisis of 2008 plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

The next financial crisis could potentially hit the world even harder.

The following are 12 shocking quotes from insiders that are warning about the horrific economic crisis that is almost here….

#1 George Soros: “Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation.”

#2 PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian: “These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion. Retail depositors would get edgy and be tempted to follow trading and institutional
clients through the exit doors. Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy.”

#3 Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy’s largest bank): “The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits.”

#4 Stefan Homburg, the head of Germany’s Institute for Public Finance: “The euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable.”

#5 EU Parliament Member Nigel Farage: “I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine.”

#6 Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics: “At this point, our base case is
that Greece will default within weeks.”

#7 Goldman Sachs strategist Alan Brazil: “Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?”

#8 International Labour Organization director general Juan Somavia recently stated that total unemployment could “increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries” by the end of 2012.

#9 Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman: “It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels.”

#10 Alastair Newton, a strategist for Nomura Securities in London: “We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis”

#11 Ann Barnhardt, head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: “It’s over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without
one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.”

#12 Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI: “When I call a recession…that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it’s not going to stop.”

*****

In my opinion, the epicenter of the “next wave” of the financial collapse is going to be in Europe.  But that does not mean that the United States is going to be okay.  The reality is that the United States never recovered from the last recession and there are already a lot of signs that we are getting ready to enter another major recession.  A major financial collapse in Europe would just accelerate our plunge into a new economic crisis.

If you want to read something that will really freak you out, you should check out what Dr. Philippa Malmgren is saying.  Dr. Philippa Malmgren is the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management.  She is also a former member of the Bush economic team. You can find her bio right here.

Malmgren is claiming that Germany is seriously considering bringing back the Deutschmark.  In fact, she claims that Germany is very busy printing new currency up.  In a list of things that we could see happen over the next few months, she included the following….

“The Germans announce they are re-introducing the Deutschmark. They have already ordered the new currency and asked that the printers hurry up.”

This is quite a claim for someone to be making.  You would think that someone that used to work in the White House would not make such a claim unless it was based on something solid.

If Germany did decide to leave the euro, you would see an implosion of the euro that would be truly historic.

But as I have written about previously, it should not surprise anyone that the end of the euro is being talked about because the euro simply does not work.

The only way that the euro would have had a chance of working is if all of the governments using the euro would have kept debt levels very low.

Unfortunately, the financial systems of the western world are designed to push governments into high levels of debt.

The truth is that the euro was doomed from the very beginning.

Now we are approaching a day of reckoning.  We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, but the bubble is ending.  There are several ways that the powers that be could handle this, but all of them will lead to greater financial instability.

In the end, we will see that the debt-fueled prosperity that the western world has been enjoying for decades was just an illusion.

Debt is a very cruel master.  It will almost always bring more pain and suffering than you anticipated.

It is easy to get into debt, but it can be very difficult to get out of debt.

There is no way that the western world can unwind this debt spiral easily.

The only way that another massive economic crisis can be put off for even a little while would be for the powers that be to “kick the can down the road” a little farther by creating even more debt.

But in the end, you can never solve a debt problem with more debt.

The next several years are going to be an incredibly clear illustration of why debt is bad.

When the dominoes start to fall, we are going to witness a financial avalanche which is going to destroy the finances of millions of people.

You might want to try to get out of the way while you still can.

The Economic Collapse