FedUpUSA

Archive for October 7th, 2011

This is a letter to OWS from FedUpUSA, one of the original Tea Parties:

We support you in exercising your First Amendment Right.  We are outraged that any peaceful demonstrator would be assaulted or abused by any authorities.

If you are protesting because there are no jobs— We stand with you.

We are for a free economy and recognize that what we have now is NOT a free economy; it is not capitalism – what we have is a fascist state or crony-capitalism. There is nothing free about doing business with Countries that manipulate their currencies to attract cheap labor. We agree that these jobs need to come back to America.

If you are protesting because no one has gone to jail— We stand with you. 

Regardless of what is being said from the white house and media, we know that there are many in the financial district and the banks that have committed fraud  and outright theft and we too want to see them prosecuted. We support: STOP THE LOOTING & START PROSECUTING.

If you are protesting because everything costs more— We stand with you.

We see prices rise in our food, gas, clothes yet our wages have stayed the same or have decreased. The Federal Reserve has bailed everyone out but us and not only are we going to have to pay for that, those bailouts make the price of everything else go up because it devalues our currency. We support monetary reform.

If you are protesting because you are tired of our bought and paid for government on both sides— We stand with you.

We are also against the banks and big corporations buying our politicians and writing laws that favor their special interests. We understand that our economy is broken BECAUSE of this and that all of our other issues will never be addressed as long as the financial elite control OUR government.

We understand that these issues cross party lines and ideologies and effect each and every one of us. We also understand that these issues will never get fixed as long as we continue to let the media, the elite, and members of the government separate us by our differing ideologies.

Only Together, can we Implement Change

It is time, We Americans, put our ideologies in our back pocket and not let them separate us so that we can work together for this ONE COMMON GOAL: to get the special interest money and elite out of OUR Government and return it to US— the people.

As long as the banks, largest corporations, and wealthy elite control our government, we will never have a representative republic and laws will continue to be passed that only benefit the few 1% at the expense of us 99%!

Demand that NOT ONE MORE LAW gets passed until they pass:

Lobby reform:

It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:

Lobby any member of the US Congress outside of the district you live, work, or own a business.

Lobby a member of congress while they are physically outside the district they represent.

Campaign Reform:

It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:

For any one person, corporation, enterprise, group, union or the like, to donate more than $2,000 to any one candidate during one campaign period.

For any member of the media to deny equal access to competing candidates.

These two laws will cut the control the Financial elite have on our government by leveling the playing field. You will have just as big as a voice with your representative as the big box retailer that resides in your town. Simply, it will end the Crony-Capitalism that is strangling our economy.

I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people.   After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians.

FedUpUSA.org

STOP THE LOOTING & START PROSECUTING

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?

It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

The Tea Party is a contradiction. They want a balanced budget, but they also want the US military to intervene everywhere. Obamacare is a dirty word, but don’t dare touch social security or medicare. Individual rights are important too, but don’t push it too far. After all, republicans came up with today’s policies.

There are a few nuts in the OWS crowd, but from what I hear “Occupy Wall Street” is about bringing the fraudsters to justice. Its about changing the banker/government dynamic that runs this country. It’s about free markets. It’s about ending endless debt. It’s about stopping the wars. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the libertarian soul of America.

Since the TP lost the focus of addressing the root problems of America, they remain unresolved.

It’s sad, really. The TP talks about sewer legislation, redistricting, and supporting House Speaker Boehner’s plan to add $2 trillion in debt, while the real issue is Congress has spent more than it takes in, and the costs of the promises outweigh the means to pay them. In the process, you and I are less free than we used to be.

There was no place left for folks to go.

It’s up to the Libertarians to let them know there is a place for them with us.

Pete Blome
Chair, Libertarian Party of Okaloosa County

Answer: only if you let them

I received an email from a friend, incl several warnings about the Occupy [somewhere] movement, written by well-known conservative authors and exhorting conservatives to shun the Occupy Wall St. [or wherever] movement because it is linked to Obama groups and pals like ACORN and Van Jones and is a false flag movement.

Now I agree that we must be careful whom we stand with, because we may be suggesting to people that we agree with the Left – unless we are perfectly clear where we stand!

Consider this: The Left has been pretending to stand with good people ever since day one, while in fact standing with Satan. Stealth is their middle name.

I believe it may be time to turn the tables on them.

Yesterday, I got an email from a TX friend with an attachment showing a pamphlet on the “Occupy Houston” movement.

His point seemed to be that their literature was not well written and that it wasn’t clear what their goals were, so maybe they are bad guys to be avoided.

Ya know what? To me, that is a perfect opportunity for us to go to work. Because they can’t control the sidewalks and there’s no way they can control me.

If I lived in that part of the country and had a few extra hours, I’d make up a large poster reading “BRING BACK THE FREE MARKET” or “NO MORE SOCIALISM, MR. PRESIDENT,” or “SOLYNDRA, THE FRUITS OF ‘STIMULUS’ ” or the like, and I would unabashedly bring it along to the rally and hold it high. Look, if this is a false flag movement and they are just pretending to be on our side, then who would dare to stop me?

This morning I was listening to NHK News from Japan, and they had an international segment featuring the Occupy Wall St. movement in the US.

Unsurprisingly, the people they interviewed said nothing remotely suggesting they were socialist sympathizers, quite the opposite.

I almost fell off my chair when one lady said:

“When Barrack Obama was elected, we assumed that because he was a black man, he would do all he could to help the poor and underprivileged. He has done none of that.”

Yes, yes, I understand Van Jones and ACORN may have ties to the movement.

So what?

When I was in Lancaster, I attended a Tea Party rally and there were some people there who obviously were trying to infiltrate. I suspect they were from ACORN.

Here is what I don’t get: The LEFT infiltrates us all the time and we can see it happening and take it for granted.

Yet if a conservative wants to do the same back to them, all of a sudden, that “taints” us. Funny thing. The Left isn’t “taintable,” but conservatives are? Are we really that weak minded that getting too close to a lefty will rub off on us?

Well, look, if being around a bunch of lefties taints you — that is, influences you — then you are not well enough grounded in your conservatism and your Christian faith to leave your home.

As for me, I say with Paul: I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I’ve committed unto Him against that day.

I mean that with regard to both my Christian faith and my political views. They are intertwined. Jesus’ view on socialism is clearly enunciated in John 6: http://laiglesforum.com/the-religious-left-in-bible-times-part-1/57.htm.

But if you are so timid in your faith and politics, and afraid of being misled by some half-baked Marxists who don’t know even a tenth of what the average conservative knows about history and economics, here is what you need to do:

Don’t ever have anything to do with a leftist. He’ll rub off on you.

Don’t go to town hall meetings and express your views. These meetings are full of lefties. It might rub off.

And don’t take part in surveys, online or off. The other respondents may be leftists. Ooooh, creepy!

Don’t write letters to the editor. The publication in which they are published is probably left of center and you might be thought of as a lefty. What would your conservative friends think of you?

Don’t go to the polls to vote. The polls are full of lefties and might persuade you to pull the wrong lever.

On the other hand, if you know what you believe and why, then go right ahead and attend any meeting or rally you darned well please and let people know how you think. Go ahead and listen to their misguided statements but be prepared to counter them – without fear, without anger, with love. You are dealing with the lost – with the weak, the ignorant. They’re in a much more precarious position than you will ever be. You can be their lighthouse. Why would you want to miss that opporunity? So, assuming you are educated on the issues (don’t try until you are), don’t be afraid to speak your mind and don’t be afraid to hold a poster advertising your view of why America is in a mess. These misguided lefties are the very ones you need to minister to, lovingly, compassionately and in God-given faith and wisdom. The chances are, many, maybe even most, will agree with you by the time you have told them what you think and why.

Consider that one of the main reasons they are in the dark is that conservatives have left them there.

We are the ones who have failed America. It’s time to grow a spine and do our job.

By Donald Hank – Laigles Forum

“A rock and a hard place” is a long-running theme of Casey Research publications. It refers to the dilemma the US government has wandered into with its continued policy of rescue inflation. The “rock” is what will happen if the Fed pauses for long in printing still more money – the collapse of an economy
burdened by an accumulation of mistakes that rescue inflation has been keeping at bay. The “hard place” is the disruptive price inflation that becomes more likely (and likely more severe) with every new dollar the Fed prints to keep the effects of those mistakes suppressed.

When the dollar was cut loose from the gold standard in 1971, the Federal Reserve was freed to create as much new money as it saw fit, whenever it saw fit. Enabled, it turned with enthusiasm to doing what central bankers imagine they are supposed to do – eliminate downturns in the economy. The Fed fancied itself as being on the answering end of a 911 system: whenever the financial markets signaled distress, whenever the economy came down with the flutters, the Federal Reserve would dispatch a van, an ambulance, a fire engine or even an assault vehicle, whatever seemed right but in every case full of cash.

To most people, rescue inflation was entirely agreeable. It made their world more comfortable and seemed to make it safer. Comfortable, yes. Safer, no. The pernicious but entirely welcome effect of rescue inflation was to cover up mistakes and keep them going. It allowed people – especially people handling other people’s money – to make progressively bigger mistakes. Lending on implausible mortgages and buying securities tied to those mortgages are the most recent examples, follies that required decades of training.

Rescue inflation allowed everyone to get away with everything. The assurance that a high-speed vehicle with flashing lights on top would always arrive in time let individuals pay for houses with a little cash and a big mortgage. It let corporate managers rely on borrowing heavily, rather than selling stock, to
raise capital. It let investors cheerfully accumulate junk bonds. And it let banks hire and set loose bright young minds to design financial gizmos with astounding leverage guaranteed to deliver excellently profitable results for so long as the economy continued on its excellent and guaranteed way. All of those
hang-glider stunts seemed safe because if at any point the prices of the assets underlying anyone’s commitment failed to rise… a Federal Reserve rescue inflation vehicle would surely dash to the scene. That’s what FedVans are for.

And rescue inflation let the politicians dodge the consequences of their own thoughtlessness. The economic drag of the tax rules the politicians found convenient to enact and the effects that deficit spending has on economic growth and on living standards were obscured by the ready supply of that all-purpose balm and lubricant, new money.

But problems that are hidden don’t go away; they accumulate; and they grow. Answering its most recent 911 call (the one that rang in 2008), the Fed dispatched an entire fleet of trucks stuffed with cash. It increased the money supply by 40%, yet today the economy is barely staggering forward. At this point, creating more cash might buy some time, but it can’t buy a solution.

The problem, unless you think there isn’t one, seems impossible to solve. But rather than dismissing the possibility of a way out, it would be more circumspect to consider how the economy might in fact navigate between the rock and the hard place. That won’t happen simply because we’ve found a way for it to happen. The White House hasn’t called me in a long time. But if we understand what it would take to slip past the rock and the hard place, we can judge how likely such a passage is.

The economy doesn’t need anyone to fix it. It’s all that fixing for the last 40 years that is the problem. Unmolested, the economy will right itself. The only thing needed is for the Great Molester, the government, to surrender to a serious regimen of behavior modification and let the economy operate without suffocating interference. Then it would be able to shed its problems – not painlessly but quickly and with a minimum of pain. Here’s the protocol.

Bring out your dead. Even after catching the trillions in bailout money thrown at them, some financial institutions remain under water – closer to the surface than before but still snorkeling. Let them go. Release them from their zombie state. Bless them with the peace of zero assistance and the promise of unbeing. Paying the dead to mimic the living casts a blight on all the banks that are competently managed, and it leaves trillions of dollars of capital to be allocated by hired hands who’ve shown by their performance that their talents call them to some other line of work.

And give up on mouth-to-mouth for the biggest corpse of all. Stop trying to prop up housing prices by financing the banking system’s huge inventory of foreclosed property and by funding programs to slow the foreclosure rate. The housing market won’t recover its health until prices reach a market-clearing
level.

Stop the acknowledged deficits now. That means cutting federal spending drastically. There’s already unanimous lip service for doing so, but even if there were a genuine resolve to do it, there are an infinite number of ways to go about it. A clean starting point would be to revert to the last Clinton budget, which would almost certainly require getting by on one war at a time. Stopping the deficits is essential to allowing the economy to heal itself because it slows the wasting of resources and because it eliminates the fear of higher tax rates, which is a fear that retards business investment.

Make tax rules a little less stupid. The two most mischievous features of the Internal Revenue Code are the double-taxation of corporate profits and the deduction for home mortgage interest. The former is a powerful and dangerous invitation for high debt-to-equity ratios; make dividends tax-deductible for the paying company, and the problem goes away. The deductibility of mortgage interest has operated as an amplifier for everything the government does to encourage overinvestment in housing. Yes, eliminating the mortgage deduction will be another blow to the housing market, but since we’re committed to bringing out the dead, let’s think about cremating the remains.

Stabilize tax rules. High tax rates are bad enough for the economy. Not knowing what next year’s tax rates are going to be is much worse. It paralyzes business decisions. Make the current rates “permanent” in the sense that it would take further legislation to change them.

Reduce the legal minimum wage to zero. Minimum wage laws are convenient for labor unions whose members are somewhat skilled, but they toss the unskilled into the economic dumpster. A minimum wage law effectively prohibits the unskilled and inexperienced from working by pricing them out of the market. It’s an unemployment guarantee program for millions of the economically weakest people in the country. I’d miss the minimum wage, because there is nothing that shouts louder that government uses the poor as human shields to protect the state. But to let the economy recover, let it go.

Destrangulate. Repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley law and its weird spawn, Dodd-Frank. Repeal Obamacare. Allow individual states to license drugs without waiting on the FDA. End all prohibitions on insider trading. Charge banks for FDIC insurance at rates tied to a balance sheet formula – and then free them to make their own lending decisions. (You might like even more deregulation than that, but we’re not building utopia, we’re only trying to avoid camping in dystopia.)

Euthanasia for Social Security and Medicare. Raise the eligibility age by one month every year. The unfunded net liabilities for those programs (variously estimated at $60 trillion to $80 trillion) will evaporate, and everyone who has been counting on impossible promises being kept will have plenty of time to come to terms with reality.

That would do it, and that or something similar is what it would take. The economy might need a year or so for the dust to settle. A certain number of mental breakdowns would be provoked by the trashing of heart-felt assumptions, but for the other 99.9999999% of us, the Greater Depression would be canceled.

It’s not politically impossible. Everyone, politician and politician-afflicted alike, is capable of a 180-degree course change when fear and pain become great enough. It’s not impossible at all. And unicorns aren’t impossible. Typically, they get started when a pony is fighting a cowlick.

At the just-concluded Casey/Sprott Summit When Money Dies, the all-star faculty unanimously agreed that the US economy is in dire straits… and will be for a while. But there are ways to protect your assets and profit from this crisis. Listen to John Hathaway, Mike Maloney, Richard Hanley, Doug Casey, Chris Martenson, and many more expert speakers on more than 20 hours of audio recordings – incl. their best stock picks and hands-on investment advice. Learn more.

Terry Coxon, Casey Research for ZeroHedge

A week after the BBC exploded Alessio Rastani to the stage, it has just done it all over again. In an interview with IMF advisor Robert Shapiro, the bailout expert has pretty much said what, once again, is on everyone’s mind: “If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system. We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world. This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serrious than the crisis in 2008…. What we don’t know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems.”

But no, Morgan Stanley does, or so they swear an unlimited number of times each day. And they say not to worry about anything because, you see, it is not like they have any upside in telling anyone the truth. Which is why for everyone hung up on the latest rumor of a plan about a plan about a plan spread by a newspaper whose very viability is tied in with that of the banks that pay for its advertising revenue, we have one thing to ask: “show us the actual plan please.” Because it is easy to say “recapitalize” this, and “bad bank” that. In practice, it is next to impossible. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, enjoy this brief relief rally driven by the fact that China is offline for the week and that the persistent source of overnight selling on Chinese “hard/crash landing” concerns has been gone simply due to an extended national holiday.  Well, that holiday is coming to an end.

By the way, Reuters, Shapiro is not a Yes Man – we’ll spare you the ruminations.

h/t Scrataliano

ZeroHedge

Mervyn King has apparently had enough of the lies….

The central bank yesterday announced its biggest stimulus since the depths of the recession, citing “vulnerabilities” related to the euro-area turmoil. King said the move, the first loosening of U.K. monetary policy since 2009, was a response to what may be the worst financial crisis ever.

“It’s pretty much a vote of no confidence in European officials,” said Richard Barwell, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, and a former Bank of England official. “Either the virus is already in the U.K. so they had to respond, or they don’t believe the problem will be sorted out. I lean toward the second because of how much they’ve done.”

What’s this?  Truth out of a central banker?  You have to be kidding me!

Now the policy action is another matter entirely.  More credit heroin in the arm is not going to fix the druggie.  It will simply make it worse, and I suspect Mervyn knows this.  But what alternative does he have, really, at this point?

Britain’s problems like most are fiscal; the monetary authorities are enablers.  What does very-low rates allow?  Ridiculous government spending, that’s what.  In addition to trying to goad consumers and businesses into taking on insoluble debt (a short-term “answer” that ultimately screws you blind) it has the same effect on governments with the same outcomes!

Do I believe we’re “days or weeks” from a catastrophe?  Maybe, maybe not.  Timing is a bitch.  But this much is relatively certain – what’s being attempted in the form of “band-aids” will not work.

The only solution is to reduce the systemic debt levels.  This means that we must accept that we have been lying to ourselves and to the people  of the nations involved.  We’ve claimed we can have all these government programs but we cannot pay for what we’re promising.

That which cannot continue forever won’t continue forever.  We’re arguing over the when, not the what, and it’s time to face the reality that the longer this goes on the worse it the outcome will be.