FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Dollar’ Category

I hate bankers and so should you.  Why? Because bankers steal a little bit of Christmas cheer
every year. For the past several years, bankers have stolen a lot of Christmas
cheer. Like the Grinch from Dr. Seuss’s famous children’s tale, How the Grinch
Stole Christmas, bankers have hearts two sizes too small, and by means of
burglary, they do their best to deprive everyone of Christmas every year. Only
unlike the Grinch, despite stealing from people every year, bankers never learn
and never reform, they never return to the people the vast amounts of money
they stole from them, and they are cold-hearted and arrogant enough to claim
that they are doing “God’s work” (as stated by Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO
Lloyd Blankfein, when in reality, they do much more harm to society as a whole
than good. And this makes the majority of bankers worse than the even the
loathed Grinch himself.

Since the institution of banking was founded, bankers have
been guilty of deceit, fraud and theft. During Biblical times, “Jesus went into
the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and
overthrew the tables of the moneychangers [bankers]..And he taught, saying unto
them, Is it not written, my house shall be called of all nations the house of
prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:15-17)

Fast forward almost a couple thousand years later, and
bankers were still committing the same theft. In fact, over a period of
eighteen hundred years, bankers learned nothing from being cast out by Jesus
from the temples, and they continued to commit such questionable acts of
morality that even a man of very questionable character himself showed nothing
but contempt for them. Though historians noted that former US President Jackson
committed numerous hateful acts against Choctaw, Chikasaw, and Cherokee
American Indians, Jackson despised bankers so much, that in front of a
delegation of bankers, he stated the following:

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and
I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the
breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you,
and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the
deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand
families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you
go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are
a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God,
I will rout you out.”

Fast forward another one hundred and eighty years, and we
discover that bankers have failed to evolve even a tiny iota from their
deceitful nature. When ex-CEO and former US Secretary Henry Paulson lied to the
American people and to US Congress by asking for more than $800 billion of
funds for the purposes of helping American home owners and then committed the
ultimate bait-and-switch fraud by handing this money to his banking friends, he
epitomized the very warning Andrew Jackson levied against bankers in the
1800’s: “When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost,
you charged it to the bank.” In this case, Paulson acted beyond the normal
level of immorality of bankers, and charged the banks’ losses to every single
American citizen.  Unlike the
Grinch, who repented from the error of his ways over a period of a few days,
bankers have refused to repent for the unsound monetary system they have
created for more than two thousand years!

To understand why Jesus threw bankers out of the temple, why
a former governor of the Bank of England stated that banking “was born in sin”,
and why Andrew Jackson, a focus of much hatred and contempt among American
Indians, viewed bankers as so immoral, that despite his own immense character
flaws, he made it his own personal crusade to throw out all bankers from US
government, one must understand how bankers continually rob all citizens of
their wealth every day. To state that bankers lie, deceive, rob and steal from
all citizens every day is not an exaggeration. The means by which they do so
today has drastically changed from the means they employed centuries ago, so
this is why so few people understand that bankers continually rob them.  Most people don’t understand that
bankers ensure the continual devaluation of the purchasing power of all money
in the system by not only literally creating money out of nothing but also by
creating money as debt.

This process, to which they cleverly assign the word
“inflation” is in reality a tax that constitutes a direct theft of your
savings, and no different than the tax British monarch King George imposed upon
the American colonists that triggered the American Revolution. The bankers have
only changed the mechanism by which they collect this tax, and the word that
they use to describe this mechanism. In America, this hidden tax of inflation,
which is a euphemism for the devaluation of the currency that sits in your
savings account, is directly responsible for the following situation that Eric
Schlosser described in his national bestseller, Fast Food Nation:

“It used to be, even in low income families, that the father
worked and the mother stayed home to raise the children. Now it seems that no
one’s home and that both parents work just to make ends meet, often holding
down two or three jobs. Parents increasingly turn to the school for help,
asking teachers to supply discipline and direction.”

The above paragraph described the family life of many
families that lived in Middle America almost a decade ago. Due to an unsound
monetary system that has led to relentless devaluation of the US dollar, the
situation described above will explode in intensity and magnitude over the next
five years, and affect everyone in America, no matter your income level and
socio-economic status. As the US dollar continues to lose purchasing power,
despite a current possible extended rally against the pound and Euro,
middle-class America will sink into the ranks of the poor. If the world operated on a sound monetary system, even in low-income families, the mother could still stay home to raise the children. Today, even in middle-class families, thanks to bankers, the mother does not have the option to stay home and raise the children. When the situation
of both parents working two or three jobs and their kids attending high school
while working 20+ hours a week is still not enough to make ends meet, crime
will explode in America during the next five years. It is the critical problems
of these very families that the bankers are creating through their monetary
policies that will come home to roost in America.

In reality, I don’t hold hatred in my heart for anyone.
Christmas is a time for forgiveness and none among us are infallible and none
among us are without sin. Yet, to be forgiven, those that continually do wrong
must repent, and bankers have yet to do anything that demonstrates that they
have even the slightest amount of regret and remorse for the economic upheaval
and chaos that they have created throughout the world in recent years. The
rich, though they may not care to understand the tale of How the Bankers Stole
Christmas now, should make it their prerogative to understand this as soon as
possible. Why? The current course the bankers have set us on has ensured that
the rich will soon become victims of desperate masses of people in their
country that will see a huge degradation in their quality of life due to the
recent monetary policies bankers have elected to impose upon their
citizens.  When large portions of
the middle class are destroyed, masses of people that never considered stealing
before, will steal and loot due to the simple instinct of survival, and a great
battle between “the haves” and the “have nots” will ensue in future years in
many developed countries, as crazy as this concept sounds today. Should the
people choose to understand “How the Bankers Stole Christmas”, the
inevitable massive increase in crime that will accompany the sinking of the
middle class into poverty can be avoided.

If instead, everyone chooses to buy into the propaganda of
the bankers, then this same scenario, as crazy as it sounds today, will come
true in the future just as the “crazy” stock market crashes I predicted in 2006
eventually materialized in 2008. 
And the biggest culprit of this shameful scenario, should it
materialize, will embarrassingly be our own refusal to see the truth about how
bankers have commandeered today’s “modern” monetary system for their own
benefit, and their own benefit only, to the detriment of every single citizen
they claim to be helping. If one doubts the enormous reach of banker’s
tentacles into governments, then perhaps now is a good time to review former
IMF Chief Economist’s Simon Johnson’s brilliant article, “The Quiet Coup”.

Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse.

Henny Sender of the FT reports that top hedge funds bet on big rise in yields:

The
recent rise in long-term US interest rates comes as good news for
several leading hedge fund managers, including John Paulson, who have
positioned their trading books to benefit from higher yields on US
Treasury securities.

 

Mr Paulson, who
made big gains earlier this decade by betting against the subprime
mortgage market and whose firm, Paulson & Co, manages $33bn, has
said he believes that government stimulus efforts would inevitably lead
to higher inflation and a corresponding rise in rates.

 

“It will
be difficult for the government to withdraw the economic stimulus,” Mr
Paulson said in a speech. “An increase in the monetary base leads to an
increase in the money supply, which leads to inflation.”

Bond
prices fall as yields rise, and Mr Paulson told the Financial Times
last week that he has been hoping to benefit in the Treasury market by
buying options that would become profitable if rates headed higher.
TPG-Axon’s Dinakar Singh has been making similar options trades,
according to a person familiar with the matter.

Julian Robertson,
the hedge fund manager, has pursued a related strategy, hoping to
benefit from a bigger difference between short-term and long-term
interest rates, known as a steeper yield curve, a person familiar with
his trades said.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which hit a
crisis low of 2.055 per cent last year, has moved from 3.2 per cent
last month to 3.75 per cent on Tuesday.

Hedge fund managers,
however, have been hesitant to engage in short sales of Treasury bonds
to profit from the rising yields – and falling prices – because of the
Federal Reserve’s heavy involvement in the market. This has led some to
buy options – dubbed “high strike receivers” – that would enable them
to profit from sharply higher Treasury yields, hedge fund managers say.
These trades, which are relatively cheap to execute because they are so
out of the money, are based on the thesis that yields could hit 7 or 8
per cent.

“If they are right, and the world ends, they will make
a fortune,” said one fund manager who is sceptical of the idea. “If
they are wrong, they haven’t lost much.”

Some traders are
cautious because many peers lost large sums betting that rates would
rise in Japan in the 1990s – as yields fell to less than half a
percentage point. The trade was termed the “black widow” because it left so many victims.

“Nobody
understood the extent of deflation and economic weakness in Japan,”
said Dino Kos of Portales Partners, a research consultancy, who was
then a Fed official. “More money was lost on that trade than on any
other single trade. Everyone piled in when rates were at 3 per cent and
then at 2.5 per cent and then at 2 per cent.”

So
is it time to place big bets on rising yields? I could easily see a
backup in yields in the near term as economic reports surprise to the
upside, but I don’t believe that bonds have entered a long-term secular
bear market. I think the hedgies are right, best to play interest rate
directional calls though options.

Also, given the increase in
liability-driven investing by pension funds worried about their funding
status, there is an upper cap on bond yields. I don’t know what the
exact magic number is, but at a certain level (say 7%), you’ll have
pensions scambling to lock in rates. Bond bears tend to ignore this
when predicting doom and gloom on bonds. All they do is focus on the
“pending collapse” of the US dollar, which won’t happen .

Good morning, worker drones: This Week in Mayhem

by Project Mayhem

Project Censored releases top censored news stories of 2009, Market Skeptics highlights catastrophic fall in global food production, gold bounces off $1100, Copenhagen succeeds in building global governance framework, Pakistan and Yemen sink further into chaos..

LAST WEEK IN MAYHEM

Project Censored releases list of 25 censored news stories of the past year

* 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
* 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
* 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
* 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
* 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
* 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
* 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
* 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
* 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
* 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
* 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
* 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
* 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
* 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
* 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/two-thousand-and-ten-book/

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

The countries that make up two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions.

The following article is HIGHLY recommended for anyone trading in the commodities futures markets or interested in possible future outcomes in 2010.

“If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports, causing the collapse of the dollar, the treasury market, derivative markets, and the global financial system. The US will experience economic disintegration.

So far the crisis has been driven by the slow and steady increase in defaults on mortgages and other loans. This is about to change. What will drive the financial crisis in 2010 will be panic about food supplies and the dollar’s plunging value. Things will start moving fast.”

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/12/2010-food-crisis-for-dummies.html

Gold bounces off $1100

Gold has bounced off $1100, as expected, but the question  is whether this level will hold.  This is almost impossible to predict…what we do know is that gold is going much higher intermediate-term.  Short-term, we could see pricing pressures on gold until we get a new leg down in the economic crisis and/or war in Central Asia.  Things are heating up around the world, particularly in Yemen and Pakistan.  Regardless, we expect a hard floor for the gold price in the range of $1000-1050.  We will watch carefully for the next two business weeks leading into Jan 1st, as this will involve year-end mark-to-market for gold on many balance sheets so expect volatility.  In terms of the next year (2010) we are expecting a dollar crisis so it would be wise to own gold under such circumstances.

Tarpley – Hyperinflation possible in 2010
http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=9059

Gerald Celente – 2010 – Prepare for the Worse
http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=9060

Copenhagen Treaty yields start of Global Governance

The Copenhagen treaty was a success despite the massive scientific scandal; the global bankster-gangsters got precisely what they wanted.  The objective was to establish the framework for a world government, which is often called ‘global governance’ in policy planning circles. The seeds of this were successfully planted.  There were two main accomplishments at Copenhagen:  1) agreement on a global transaction tax on GDP, paid to the World Bank  and 2) agreement on preliminary funding for global governance, conservatively $100bn by 2020 but we believe this number will be much much higher (probably in trillions).

“In 2004, it was less than $300 million. But in 2005, the trade really started to soar, ending the year with $10.8 billion-worth of transactions. A year later, in 2006, the “carbon” market had grown to $31 billion. In 2007, again it more than doubled its turnover, to $64 billion. Last year, it did it again, reaching a colossal $126 billion. By 2020, some estimates suggest the annual value will reach $2 trillion.”

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/protecting-big-carbon.html

“This is the biggest heist in history. As they poured carbon over snow-covered Denmark from their gas-guzzling jets, world leaders were congratulating themselves on securing a deal which will make their backers and financiers a trillion pounds a year. These riches will come from buying and selling permits, the so-called ‘carbon credits’ which allow industry and electricity generators in developed countries to emit carbon dioxide.

The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about ‘saving the planet’. They were always about money.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1237235/ANALYSIS-Saved–trillion-pound-trade-carbon.html

Copenhagen accord keeps Big Carbon in business

“The part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.

The only tree they were concerned with hugging was the money tree and all the vast political apparatus that now supports it, allowing governments to tax and regulate us into handing over ever more of our money, largely without realising it, every time we drive a car, fly in a plane, pay our electricity bill or carry out any of a vast range of activities that involve the emission of CO2. ”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6845686/Copenhagen-accord-keeps-Big-Carbon-in-business.html

Saudis rain missiles down on Yemen

Saudi warplanes rain ’1,011 missiles’ on Yemen
“Houthi fighters say Saudi warplanes have fired some 1,011 missiles on the borderline with Yemen where the Shia population is already under heavy state-led and US-aided bombardment. “

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=114162&sectionid=351020206

US air raids kill 63 civilians in Yemen
“Yemen’s Houthi fighters say scores of civilians, including many children, have been killed in US air-raids in the southeast of the war-stricken Arab country.”
http://dprogram.net/2009/12/19/us-air-raids-kill-63-civilians-in-yemen/

Obama Ordered U.S. Military Strike on Yemen Terrorists
“The Yemen attacks by the U.S. military represent a major escalation of the Obama administration’s campaign against al Qaeda.”

Pakistan on brink ;  Obama feigns surprise

Internally displaced Pakistani women and children, aka alQueda

Pakistan continues to deteriorate, as we have been expected since the election of Obama.  There is definitely a new war brewing in the region.  The most likely conflict is either an event justifying going into Pakistan, or an event justifying going into Iran.  In either case, doing so would land us in deep deep trouble, and would escalate into a regional war.  Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country, with ballistic and cruise missiles, and Iran has advanced Russian weaponry.  War in either country would be a big mistake with catastrophic consequences for the world, but our fearless leaders do not seem to care about the people of the world or their lives.  Regardless, the CIA and ISI are doing an excellent job of destabilizing Pakistan, which seems to be the policy objectiive.

Pakistan political crisis deepens

“THE political crisis in Pakistan has deepened after the Government’s anti-corruption agency sought a warrant for the arrest of the country’s Interior Minister.”

http://www.theage.com.au/world/pakistan-in-crisis-as-creeping-coup-unfolds-20091219-l6lf.html

Symptom of a Deeper Malady Pakistan’s Refugee Disaster

In the meantime, with the winter months fast approaching, hundreds of thousands of “unintegrated” refugees who do not find more durable shelter, even as military sweeps continue, could face exposure and starvation. Some aid groups are demanding that the United States pressure Pakistan to respect international humanitarian law and allow independent access to the refugees.

THIS WEEK IN MAYHEM

source: cmegroup

Not much happening this week due to the Christmas holiday. Tuesday brings us the GDP number and existing home sales, Wednesday is new home sales, and Thursday is durable goods orders and jobless claims.  This week we are watching Yemen and Pakistan.

Have a great week and Merry Christmas

Project Mayhem Research (PMR) is a DC/Baltimore-based grassroots think tank dedicated to exposing corruption worldwide. PMR is affiliated with Zerohedge.com, a popular and growing anti-corruption site, through contribution of free articles for the public. Topics include the politics of war and weapons systems, unexpected applications of cybernetics, the growing international surveillance state, global warming ‘deindustrialization’ economics, broad systemic international corruption , in-depth policy analysis of studies from bank and military funded research groups, genetic analysis and surveillance of pandemic influenza, corruption in the international gold market, the power structure and history of the global elite, and analysis of their political objectives expressed through monopolistic international finance capital (read: powerful banks) between now and 2050.

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Could the next black/green/dark gray swan be so obvious that it has avoided everyone? Well, except for the deputy governor of the Bank of China, who just gave the world a startling reminder of economics 101, when he said that it is “getting harder for governments to buy United States Treasuries because
the US’s shrinking current-account gap is reducing the supply of dollars
overseas.” Oops.

The funny thing about natural (and economic) systems: they can only be pushed so far before they snap back to default state. With the entire world embarking on an unprecedented spree of domestic bubble blowing to mask the collapse in global GDP, everyone forgot to trade. Zero Hedge has long emphasized that the drop in world trade can only sustain for so long before it brings the current destabilized system back to some form of equilibrium. Because with every country intent on merely printing more of its own currency, whether it is to build bridges or to make the stock of electronic book fads trade at 100x earnings, said countries ran out of non-domestic cash. Alas, this is most critical for the United States, now that Treasury monetization is over, as the US needs to constantly find foreign buyers of its debt to fund unsustainable deficits. Foreign buyers who have US dollars. And according to Shanghai Daily, this could be a big, big problem.

Here is what the BOC’s Zhu Min said earlier:

“The United States cannot force foreign governments to increase their
holdings of Treasuries,” Zhu said, according to an audio recording of
his remarks. “Double the holdings? It is definitely impossible.”

“The
US current account deficit is falling as residents’ savings increase,
so its trade turnover is falling, which means the US is supplying fewer
dollars to the rest of the world,” he added. “The world does not have
so much money to buy more US Treasuries.”

In a nutshell, in printing trillions of assorted securities, the Treasury has soaked up the world’s dollars, which due to US banks not lending, is sitting and collecting dust in the form of bank excess reserves. These excess reserves can not be used to buy Treasuries and MBS as that would be literal monetization (as opposed to the figurative one which is what QE has been). And the world is running out of dollars with which to buy Treasuries.

Does this mean that the “world” will be forced to buy dollars, and thus spike the value of the greenback? Not necessarily:

In a discussion on the global role of the dollar, Zhu told an academic
audience that it was inevitable that the dollar would continue to fall
in value because Washington continued to issue more Treasuries to
finance its deficit spending.

The EURUSD 50 DMA of $1.41 is fast approaching, just as Goldman predicted. The dollar is now back to early September levels, as the predicted unwind of the carry trade is among us. Was the European implosion really all that unpredictable? With equities lagging, once the reality of the move is comprehended, look out below in stocks.

Will the 23.6 on the Fib be broken shortly and provide the new support level or will this be the mythical 1,115 on the S&P that just can’t be broken. We may get the answer today.

Submitted by Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan of Scope Labs

Are financial markets a direct reflection of the overall health of a nation? I wish they were not, but I fear they are.

I wonder at times if our nation has entered a state of purgatory –
all of us mulling around in the waiting room to Hell, anxiously
counting the minutes until the grim reaper saunters through the door
sickle in hand his mission to send us off to eternal damnation.
Unfortunately, there is little time to close this door so that we may
stave off this potential fate that looms so near. What we need to alter
this course is a procession of men who possess moral fortitude and
common sense, men of rationality and reason. Men of action who will set
in motion the dismantling of institutions that bleed this nation dry.

Hope is not a strategy. This present state of manufactured optimism
emanating from the White House and our news outlets is contemptible. We
are in dire need of new reformist leadership and of new voices that
will speak the truth. A national purification is long overdue. Time is
not on our side. Look at the track record this nation has racked up
over the last few decades and this economic and moral purgatory in
which we find ourselves might very well mark the beginning of our walk
of death down the long road to Hell.

I make this analogy of a national state of purgatory not in jest,
but rather in practical terms. This nation has gone the way of an
absolute meltdown of morality and ethics. We’ve reverted to a sort of
Wild West where anything goes. From the halls of congress to our
corporate boardrooms our collective morality bar has sunk so low we
cannot go any lower without disconnecting from the great past this
nation is starved to regain. We stand dangerously close to the point
where immorality begets our undoing.

Personally, I am father to a daughter of fourteen years. Brett, my
co-author, is father to a twenty-month old daughter and an
eighteen-year old son. We desperately want to create for our children a
better world. But we are fallible men, and certainly not saints. The
paragraphs you are about to read are not written from some moral high
ground, or a Holier-than-thou pulpit, but rather from saddened hearts
when we see that by walking our own moral tightrope, if we were to
allow ourselves to slip below the bar, however slightly, we would be
just as guilty as the worst perpetrators of our nation’s moral
destruction. Also, when witness to greater moral transgressions, by our
own inaction, we become part of the problem. And we are just two men.
Amplify this by fifty million, one hundred million, or three hundred
million fold and it is no wonder immorality permeates our society.

This article is our personal effort to call people’s attention to
the truth. The brevity of our circumstance is immeasurable by past
reference. Economically, we have never been so challenged. Over the
past few decades a gullible US population cheered the halls of congress
and the Oval Office alike as the incestuous bedfellows of money and
politics ushered in a financial Coup d’état – co-opting our public
trusts with the greed and excess of Wall Street. Profits are now had at
any cost – damn the long-term consequences. Instead of being exposed as
the obvious fraud he was, Bernie Maddoff was coddled by the SEC – an
institution whose role as regulator is a complete failure. As Wall
Street and Washington raped an entire nation, employees of the SEC were
too busy surfing porn on the Internet and running private businesses
instead of doing the jobs taxpayers pay them to do. All the while,
young girls were selling their virginity to the highest bidder in
public cyber-forums where grown men (not hormonally charged teenage
boys) seek out their sexual fantasies in the netherworld of Internet
pornography. What of the wives, children, and even parents of these
men? Do they approve of such questionable actions?

Think of our children turning on the television to see people eating
bile, cow blood, and live bugs for money on game shows like Fear
Factor, or Flavor Flav and his hit reality show where he maintains a
stable of women all of whom physically fight each other to have sex
with him because he’s a celebrity – and a damn ugly one at that. And
finally, there’s always Survivor, the ultimate demonstration of all
things wrong with modern human interaction. A reality show that pits
person against person in a deceitful game of moral destruction where
lack of ethics are rewarded, instead of punished. Survivor, this is
what our nation’s leadership has become. Win at any cost. Damn the
future of anyone but myself.

Morality is in great part the measure of a nation. Have we unlearned
morality? Is this why we find ourselves staring down the abyss?

We are allowing ourselves to become more corrupt by the minute. We
stare into the face of our future being raped, but we do nothing. We
are as corrupt as the corrupters. We accept the unacceptable. We fail
to understand that absolute power, corrupts absolutely. In what will go
down as the greatest financial heist in history our leaders have chosen
to reward corrupt individuals and their hollow corporations for what
are arguably criminal levels of risk behavior by the moneyed elite of
this country. What message does that send to our children, or to anyone
for that matter? Be as corrupt as possible in the US and you will be
rewarded? Be the biggest failure jeopardizing the fate of others then
stand in the corporate welfare line with all the other wealthiest
institutions of the world, your greedy hand extended for a government
bailout check while you simultaneously foreclose on an entire nation?
Talk about the rich corralling the masses. It’s no wonder someone
coined the term “The Sheeple.”

The path we traveled to this purgatorial limbo is both easily
understood and misunderstood. The answers to understanding are
sometimes right in front of us. What are seemingly benign things or
actions, those everyday judgments or decisions we make to do one thing
or another, are not always benign. Tell a little white lie to make that
one sale that will put us into our bonus. Rig the game in our favor so
that we might enjoy a little more opulence for the few decades we have
remaining on this planet. Look the other way while the Federal Reserve
and Wall Street blow economic bubble after economic bubble and in the
process create a six-hundred trillion dollar shadow banking system that
plays by no one’s rules but its own. In the case of Goldman Sachs, and
Wall Street in general, lie, cheat, and steal their way to
profitability at the expense of three hundred million taxpayers. The
fact is that we have become an uncooperative nation willing to take
advantage of anyone for the sake of profit. The idea of building a
cooperative future where everyone wins has been sacrificed at the altar
of short-mindedness.

It might be this purgatorial limbo I speak of is simpler than it
appears. It could be that we are collectively suffering the
consequences of the “Peter Principle”, or getting to the job of
failure. This principle supposes that an individual rises in a
corporate hierarchy to their first level of incompetence. An assembly
worker gets promoted to supervisor then to assistant manager, then
manager, until he next gets promoted to an upper management job for
which he is ill equipped and subsequently gets promoted no further as
he can no longer demonstrate the competence required for the task at
hand. He rather relies on subordinates who are then stuck with an upper
manager who cannot carry out his own duties. Could this be the state of
our nation? Have we been promoted as far as our competence allows? Are
we in fact incompetent to handle our future? Have we now elected a man
just incompetent enough for the Presidency who is being manipulated by
Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and a circle of (previous) Wall
Street insiders now on the government payroll as cabinet members and
high-ranking advisors? The saddest thing is that we sit idly by whilst
our virtue is being stolen. We do nothing.

A view of the world through rose-colored glasses does no one, any
good. We are not as resilient as we think we are. Instead, we exist in
a world of synthetic productivity where multi-tasking renders us
incapable of doing anything effectively or with any level of
competence. Multi-tasking, that art of simultaneous ineffectiveness is
a counter productive weapon that to a large degree has contributed to
the potential failure of this nation. If you were to listen to Alan
Greenspan however, you would believe that multi-tasking through
technological gains by way of the “new paradigm” was the gold at the
end of the Information Superhighway and that exotic mortgages and the
burgeoning spending class paved the road to riches. We now know these
premises to be empirically wrong.

It can now be argued that what would seemingly be advancements in
productivity are proving to be setbacks. The Information Superhighway
has led us to an era of technological arrogance. In reality all we have
accomplished is to dilute our ability to carry out simple tasks as we
click from a quarterly sales report due in an hour, to Facebook, to
on-line solitaire, to writing an email explaining to our boss why the
quarterly report will be delayed this day. We are a nation of excuse
makers. We look for someone else to keep us one step ahead of our
accumulating debt that smothers the potential of what could have been
an equitable future. Ironically, it is our technological arrogance that
impedes our ability to produce and manufacture our way to prosperity.

Craftsmen who used to flock to this country to fulfill the needs of
a manufacturing base flock here no more. “Made in the USA” used to mean
something. It meant quality. It was the definition of industrial
capitalism. But now through the wonders of globalization we have
exported our craftsmanship through an outflow of jobs to China and
India as we turned everyone in the USA into real estate agents,
mortgage brokers, and web designers – a perfect playground for bankers
to ply their craft, lending money in every creative manner both
thinkable, and unthinkable. “Made in the USA” has been reduced to the
status of punch-line – synonymous only with “Mortgage Backed
Securities” and other “Toxic Derivatives.”

Is it any wonder we have evolved into the ‘entitled society’? If we
weren’t on the government payroll, or subsidized by the US taxpayer
through social welfare then we were borrowing our way to prosperity.
Enter the God-fearing middle class. Just dumb enough to buy into the
scam a couple hundred million people began signing over their
paychecks, selling their future for the enjoyment of having things now.
We were transformed into non-productive Sheeple, selling our souls for
an easier life in lieu of a better future for our children. At our
current rate of productive attrition we will soon be a nation of
declawed housecats, possessing no skill-set whatsoever to survive in a
world where the ability to produce real goods still reins supreme. Yet
we remain the ‘entitled society’, when we are entitled to nothing.

We forget (through economic amnesia) that throughout history all
societies fail. Nicolaus Copernicus maintained that civilizations
failed when bad money, controlled and understood by an elite few, drove
out good money. The same can be said for morality. Bad, drives out
good. This is a reality of which we should all be acutely aware but
rather are immune to its possibility. We dangerously believe we cannot
fail. That, in fact, is the greatest gamble of all. A roll of the dice
against history, a bet against all natural laws of the universe, all
things are in a state of entropy. All things eventually wither away to
nothing. To possess longevity is to be ahead of the universe. Sadly, we
have constructed a fragile world that produces material things that do
not last. The fiat money we use as the currency of our production is by
design, destructive itself. The Federal Reserve prints greed, nothing
more. But still we covet it. We pursue it as if it had value. And in
this pursuit we destroy earth’s resources as if the laws of nature have
no relevance. We believe there is only now.

We, the entitled society, morally and fiscally bankrupt have borrowed,
spent, and bailed our way into a historical corner. Nero should be so
proud. Our public trusts are nothing more than government sanctioned
check-kiting operations shifting liabilities from one credit card to
another faster than our creditors can say “Federal Reserve.” The
Ponzi-scheme that is our fiat currency system is about to go the way of
what was for a time the symbol of American superiority, General Motors.
It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for
our nation. As I claimed in 2005 that GM would go bankrupt I will now
guarantee that the US government is soon to follow. How our ultimate
entropy will take form I cannot say, but form it will. We will default.
We will restructure. It will be at this point our arrogance will end.