FedUpUSA

Archive for January 10th, 2013

Well now, at least we have one decent Senator….

A strongly worded statement by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. — prepared in anticipation of that nomination and obtained by Fox News — signals the bumpy ride Lew could face during the Senate confirmation process. Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, says Lew misled Congress about the White House’s budget proposals and argues that should disqualify him from being put in charge of the government’s finances.

“Lew, as the president’s budget director, appeared before Congress and continued to insist that President Obama’s budget-which Lew had crafted-would not add to the debt of the United States,” Sessions said in the statement, calling Lew’s comments “the most direct and important false assertion during my entire time in Washington.”

“The most direct and false assertion”?  Oh I don’t know about that.  There have been so many to choose from, including the $700 billion that was allegedly to buy “toxic assets” but Paulson knew good and damn well he intended to use elsewhere before TARP was passed, as was revealed during hearings under oath by Kashkari.

But I’ll take this as at least a lie of the same degree, if not greater.  And the fact of the matter is that Congress has to stop accepting these lies and ratifying them, because once you take a lie told to you, act on and incorporate it and then do not bring the person(s) who lied to you to justice when that becomes apparent you are complicit in and an equal party to the lie yourself!

So I’m heartened to hear this from Jeff Sessions, but I remain deeply skeptical that Mr. Sessions, or anyone else for that matter on Capitol Hill, will actually force the truth to be told and accountability be enforced upon those both in the Administration and Congress who have enabled and promulgated this outrageous mess of deficit spending we have in the US today.

And make no mistake folks — I’ve talked with enough Senators’ offices to be utterly convinced that The Senate, by and large, knows full well how deficit spending screws everyone in America — that it is exactly identical, economically, to a tax — and yet they are unwilling to come before the people and both explain their conduct thus far in this regard and change it.

As I have noted before Lew is unsuitable for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that Obama could (and almost-certainly will) use him as a tool to play games with The Second Amendment.  But this is a function of his being tiedbelow the waist to The President and not so much a matter of his personal ideology.  As a consequence it most-certainly applies on matter of the budget and fiscal policy as well; my original indictment was not limited to Constitutional concerns.

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The $1 trillion coin saga takes an unexpected twist….

The $1 trillion platinum coin saga took a surprising turn as the Central Bank of Mars has expressed interest in buying 100 of the proposed coins. Interpreters are puzzling over the meaning and subtexts of the Martian communique; since Martian is described as an often-ambiguous combination of Fortran and Hungarian, this is no easy task.

Opinion on the Martian offer is divided. Some suspect the Martian Central Bank intends to buy the $100 trillion in platinum coins with electronically created quatloos, i.e. worthless currency.

These observers believe the Martians intend to claim the $100 trillion in platinum coins constitutes a claim on the entire U.S.A., the purchase of which would effectively give the Martian Central Bank a massive beachhead on Earth.

Others believe the Martian Central Bank is simply playing an interplanetary practical joke, showing that any central bank that issues its own currency can magically create phantom money and assets. What better way to illustrate this than to buy $100 trillion in phantom assets with equally phantom quatloos?

A smaller cadre of analysts suspect the Martian Central Bank naively believes the fantasy that the arbitrary creation of assets, either via platinum coins or electronic entries in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, creates actual value. Though this credulity borders on the fantastic, these analysts point to the many commentators in the U.S. who have bought into the platinum coin fantasy.

If Paul Krugman et al. have swallowed the fantasy that something of real value can be created from nothing, then why not the Martian Central Bank?

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds