Joseph Marohl

Six days after the inauguration—six days after Pastor Rick Warren, looking like a reupholstered Jerry Falwell, bestows his blessings on America and Barack Obama’s Presidency—the Chinese New Year begins.

It will be the Year of the Ox. Oxen, as you probably know, are castrated bulls.

Lacking a true gift for superstition, I assign little real importance to this fact. But as horoscopy goes, Chinese astrology has always served me better than the Western version. Under the latter, I am an Aries, therefore, stubborn, egoistic, combative, impulsive to the point of foolhardiness, all moral sense subjugated to raging lust. Fair enough. Under the former, I am a Snake, therefore, carnal, sensuous, intellectual, artistic, unforgiving with a preternaturally long memory for grudges. Bull’s eye.

The United States is in deeper debt to China—$585 billion—than to any other nation, only another reason to believe our collective futures lie in Chinese hands. So let me peer into my weathered, brittle paperbound edition of Theodora Lau’s The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes, copyright 1980, to see what the new year holds in store.

Lau opens her section on The Year of the Ox with the statement: “We will feel the yoke of responsibility coming down on us this year.” Okay, so after 2008, we could all see this one coming, though Lau pegged it 28 years ago. She follows with “The trials and tribulations the Ox year brings will be mainly on the home front. It is a good time to settle domestic affairs and put your house in order.” Henry Paulson should only have been this prescient.

After stating that the Ox views politics and diplomacy, along with frivolities of every sort, with indifference, Lau begins to sound like my dad: “No work, no pay! … The Spartan influence of the Ox will be a constantly cracking whip over our heads. [T]he year of the Ox favors discipline. … This is no time for tricky shortcuts.”

Just so I get her point, Lau aims a closing shot directly at me: “For the rebels, it may be worthwhile to point out that although the stoical Ox is soft-spoken, he carries a big stick, and this is his year.”

In particular, the year 2009 will be the year of the “Earth” Ox—not a nod to environmentalism, though no doubt cleaning up the mess we’ve made of the planet is part of the work cut out for us. The Earth Ox favors duty over creativity, practicality over idealism, stability over progress, sense over sensibility, endurance over complaint, and determination over cynicism.

On a happier note, children born next year can be expected to whine less (“This child will not be a crybaby”), value privacy more, and exhibit patience, perseverance, and responsibility. Ox-people thrive on discipline and order (Richard Nixon, the Emperor Hirohito and Adolph Hitler were all Ox-people, but, happily, so were Walt Disney, Vincent Van Gogh, and Charlie Chaplin).

Astrology aside, it seems clear to me that we have work to do in the coming year. Given the work’s immense importance—to our pocketbooks, to peace, to justice, to life, to the preservation of what it means to be human—it’s important that we look at the tasks ahead with all the optimism we can humanly muster. We must persevere to survive.

We must not panic, and we must contain our worries and sense of dread. We need to gain or regain a sense of the common good—set aside our private interests, if necessary, even perhaps our high ideals (at least the ones so high we can’t actually see the tops of)—and pitch in to make things better than they are.

Even without lunar insights, I can pretty well assure you that we will not entirely solve the mess we’re in—and are about to slip into deeper—even with God’s and Obama’s help. But we can take a point or two from the stoical Ox, and whine and moan a little less, however Mad Max the world becomes, and temper the cynicism we’ve so carefully cultivated since our freshmen years at college with a little kindness and humane understanding.

One certainty I subscribe to, which all forms of astrology support: Things will change.

Kelly

My Christmas wish this year was an intangible impossibility, to say the least. But, I was feeling a desperation that actually tempted me to long for a pause, like a stop button on a remote control that would allow us to stay hidden in 2008 just a little while longer. Long enough to get our bearings and thoughtfully prepare for the coming year. By prepare, I do not mean writing out my resolutions for 2009. To prepare, in this context, I mean saving enough paychecks to have a food supply that can sustain my family for a few years, or saving enough paychecks to move us to the middle of nowhere in hopes of being safe. Not plausible, and I assure you-I understand that. We have no control over time and the way it thrusts us into week after week. Christmas has come and gone, the way it does every year. And in a few short days 2009 will be upon us.

The reality, it seems, is that we are quite possibly headed for the most difficult times of our lives. And though I would prefer to take the bull by the horns and reign in the new year with a “positive” outlook, squinting through the bleak forecast of economic turmoil has shaped my outlook as anything but positive. In all honesty, it is breathtakingly scary. Breathtaking would describe how we arrived at this point, all of us asleep at the wheel and working for Washington, distracted by playdates and Super Bowls, tivo and the iPhone; there was something for everyone and a credit card or second mortgage to make it happen. Scary is what comes next, as we shift gears away from consumerism and pull the curtain back from an ideology that has trapped us.

Print and spend, tax and spend, stir until slightly lumpy. Throw in a few wars, namely the most recent Iraq War, an unsustainable social security and medicaid program, lace it with NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO, sprinkle with bureaucrats, while the bankers heat and serve. A recipe for disaster is baking in America’s oven.

It will be the year of the awakening. Unfortunately, our awakening will not come without despair.

Gerald Celente, of the Trends Research Institute and a leading trends forecaster for over twenty years, has had much to say about the coming year(s); warning us that the next Great Depression is underway.

Gearld Celente talks about the last retail Christmas-11/10/2008

Gerald Celente on The Lew Rockwell Show-12/14/2008

Allison Bricker

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) discussing the auto bailout given to the Big 3 by President Bush.

Allison Bricker

Video interview of Peter Schiff on CNN Your Money debating the auto industry bailout.

Joseph Marohl

I can’t quite bring myself to wish for a too speedy recovery of the economy, fearing the selling out of unions and workers in the interest of Wall Street investors and corporate CEOs to achieve an empty, polarizing national “prosperity.”

When I hear Republicans (Senator Bob Corker et al.) blame unionized auto workers for the collapse of the US auto industry—not bad management, not overcompensated CEOs, not arrogance and irresponsibility towards the environment and consumer safety, not the prioritization of advertising over customer service—and, further, to tweak the figures on worker compensation to include benefits as part of hourly wages and yet make no comparison to what the highest paid execs get for failing miserably in their jobs—I suspect that the plan in the works is to screw the little people to make them compliant employees and consumers—like the Chinese, from whose financially engorged government the US will borrow the billions that will disappear into the black hole of corporate bookkeeping and overseas wars (lest we forget the $9 billion that vanished in “Iraqi reconstruction” in 2005).

I am hardly an expert on money—I’m deep in debt, living payday to payday on a community college instructor’s salary, yet as subject to the allure of smart, trendy bistros and glittering commodities as the next guy—so I do not understand how further debt and inflation will solve matters.

Isn’t a large part of problem speculation and the fluffing up of fiat currencies to self-fulfill capitalist myths that business must grow or die? Really, why can’t somebody who makes a million dollars, let’s say, live comfortably on that amount—and not immediately set sights on a billion? Why must a corporation favor investors so very much more than its customers and employees?

No, I have no answers, and I fear I have an insufficient grasp of the problem—but even if American workers are indeed “overpaid” when compared to workers in India and Mexico, how is it that they—and not CEOs who average over $600,000 per year ($14.2 million per CEO at Fortune 500 companies)—have “only themselves to blame” for the collapse of the economy, not only in the United States, but in Japan, the UK, Iceland, etc., etc., etc.?

Allison Bricker

Update: The 2nd video of Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) speaking out against FEDERAL RESERVE and monetary policy is now available. Sadly, the House passed the auto bailout bill Wednesday evening. The only hope to stop the auto bailout now rests with the Senate. Every Dollar given to the Corportacracy, is another Dollar borrowed from foreign creditors and thus one more Dollar mortgaged against our future generations.

In a capitalism with a free market, companies who make poor choices fail. They then go into bankruptcy and either change their flawed business models or are absorbed by competitors or cease operations. By bailing out these incompetent automotive industry executives, it further substantiates two very important points:

1. We in America do not have a Capitalist Free Market, we have allowed our Republic to become a Corporatism, where business failures are not an option as long as you grease the hands of politicians and special interests. Thereby causing motivation for additional mismanaged companies to seek bailouts.




2. The current crop of plutocratic oligarchs are determined to cushion their own unearned wealth and lifestyles while caring not one iota for us, our children or our grandchildren who will suffer from a declining standard of living.

These reckless spending policies must cease or our Republic will fail, it is not an opinion, it is not speculation, it is fact. The era of buy now, pay later is over. Please if you are taking the time to read this post and have thus read this far, then please phone your Senators and demand that they vote NO on the automotive industry bailout.

Let us give them this chance to show that they understand their job descriptions and oaths of office.

Today on the House floor, Representative Ron Paul lambasted his colleagues in Congress for the endless bailouts they have issued over the last 6 months. He mentioned sarcastically during his speech that he ran the risk of being dismissed for referencing the Constitution, but stressed that Congress must learn to restrain itself to its Constitutional bounds or run the risk of the recession worsening.

The House is scheduled to vote on another $15 Billion Dollars for the Big 3 automakers. The AP is reporting:

The proposal would attach an array of conditions to the auto bailout money, including some of the same restrictions imposed on banks as part of the Wall Street rescue. Among them are limits on executive compensation, a prohibition on paying dividends, and requirements that the government share in future profits and taxpayers be repaid before any other shareholders.

The proposal gives the car czar say-so over any major business decisions by the automakers while they’re taking advantage of federal aid. The companies would have to open their books to the government, including informing the overseer of any transaction of $25 million or more.

Source(s): C-SPAN • Associated Press, “Top Senate Democrat sees auto bailout by Wednesday”

Kelly

The following videos are from an interview of Peter Schiff, financial expert and President of Euro-Pacific Capital, from 2002. His analysis of our nation’s economic future is quite alarming. Given the current circumstances, one might say that Peter Schiff was ahead of his time; perhaps the Paul Revere of today, warning us of our collapsing economy.

Part 1

Part 2

Allison Bricker

NOTE: This is the fourth part in a 4 part series. Your questions and commentary are both welcomed and appreciated.

• Part 1 - How to Save the Republic
• Part 2 - Abolish the Income Tax
• Part 3 - Repeal the Direct Election of Senators
• Part 4 - Similarities Between the Great Depression and Our Current Crisis

As the Dow Jones Industrial average continues its most volatile sessions in recent times, up 700 points one day, down 400 the next, the United States government continues its pointless scramble to prop up the debt based house-of-cards it built itself upon. It is most assuredly eerie when one dives down into the annals of history; back to our Republic’s last great economic calamity, the Great Depression. Upon further inspection, we see the same type of centralized planning and grossly negligent monetary policy going on today is exactly what brought Americans to their knees leading up to and throughout the Great Depression.

After the FEDERAL RESERVE Act of 1913, “fractional reserve banking”¹ now became the law of the land. Fractional reserve banking allows that for every $100 Dollars deposited into a bank, $900 Dollars of “new loans” (debt) can be created out of thin air and thus issued by said bank¹. The system accomplishes this by clinging to the principle that no more than a small minority of depositors will ever seek to withdraw their money at one time. Operating under this hedge of the fractional reserve system dictated by the FEDERAL RESERVE, debt soared throughout the 1920’s. This new massive influx of debt was of course on top of the massive debt in the form of bonds borrowed from the FEDERAL RESERVE in order to finance World War I.

With banks lending at a record pace for the new gadgets of the decade and a new need for housing, it was not long before many Americans began plunging themselves into debt. In these exuberant times and with easy access to “credit”, real estate prices began to soar. The apex of this bubble came in 1925, soon there after people began defaulting on their over leveraged loans at an escalating rate². Foreclosures began to rise as the defaults continued to pile up which in turn led to bank failures due to over exposure in the housing market.

Additionally, the new automated technology which once had employed thousands from its initial creation, now began to replace these same workers en mass as the efficiency gains of the new machinery made them obsolete. President Hoover, who as Secretary of Commerce under President Coolidge, birthed unemployment benefits, believing that “depressions were caused by “low wages”, now called for a massive “bailout” of the economy by a gigantic expansion of public works programs, price controls, subsidies, and the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation just to name a few.

Four short years later in October of 1929, over a period of five days, a market built on imaginary wealth felt the full force of a debt based economy and collapsed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing 25% down from its high. Thus signaling the beginning of a decade’s long economic depression which would see the market lose 85% of its value and not trade at pre-crash levels again until January of 1951.³

As the depression took hold, the RFC dispersed billions of Dollars to state and local governments, made loans to banks, railroads, farm mortgage associations, and other businesses in an attempt to “fix” the economy. Interestingly, President Herbert Hoover is often blamed for “doing nothing”, however during the 1932 campaign for President, then candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:⁴

Candidate Roosevelt promised Americans throughout the campaign that he would seek immediate and drastic reductions of all public expenditures, abolish useless commissions and offices, consolidate bureaus and eliminate [government] extravagances. He went on to imply specifically targeted tax cuts, and promised to retain a sound currency at all hazards. All of his campaign promises were also approved planks of the Democratic Party Platform of that same year.⁵

However, when Roosevelt took office after defeating Hoover, his promises and the party planks fell by the wayside. Apparently Roosevelt thought of himself as the Godlike man he spoke of during the campaign and instead went on to expand Hoover’s meddling and interventionism into the economy, offering the American people a “New Deal”. Even though the government school history books credit FDR with the New Deal and saving the economy, Rexford Guy Tugwell a Roosevelt aide said years later, “We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”⁸

Even with President Roosevelt’s meddling, the economy never recovered during his Presidency and only exacerbated the situation. Finally after emerging victorious from World War II and after FDR’s death, the American economy was able to drag itself out of the Great Depression.

In fact a recent study from 2004 by UCLA economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian found that:

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.“⁶

Further, just six short years ago, current Chairman of the FEDERAL RESERVE, Ben Bernake, said during a speech at Milton Freidman’s 90th birthday that Mr. Friedman was right, the government’s intervention caused/prolonged the Great Depression.⁷

Thus, as we sit here today with our Hoover; President Bush, and the 2nd coming of FDR; President-Elect Obama, the same cycle is on track to repeat itself all over again. We have a housing crisis created and fostered by the Federal government via the “Community Reinvestment Act”, which mandated mortgage loans by banks to wholly unqualified loan applicants. A mismanaged monetary policy by the same culprits, ergo the FEDERAL RESERVE, which prevented the recession after the “Tech Bubble” burst. The TARP fund bailout in homage to the RFC, and an incoming President who thinks nationalization of industries, price and wage controls coupled with massive government construction projects will fix what the bankers and plutocrats created in the first place.

In conclusion, there are some notable exceptions which should not be ignored; for one, we no longer have any semblance of a sound currency as we did in 1929 and two, the creditors to all this debt are no longer domestic, as the majority of our government’s financing comes from over seas.

Souce(s): ¹Modern Money Mechanics, FEDERAL RESERVE Bank of CHICAGO • ² Lessons from the Great American Real Estate Bubble:Florida 1926, National Bureau of Economic Research & Rutgers Univ, July 2008 • ³ The Economist, “Economics focus: The Great Depression” September, 17th 1998 • ⁴ Ralph de Toledano, INSIGHT, “Democrats Don’t Recall FDR’s ‘Promises’• ⁵ The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara • ⁶ FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate, UCLA newsroom • ⁷ Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 8, 2002, FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD • ⁸ Paul Johnson, “A History of the American People” - New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997, p. 74

Kelly

As the “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” sound-bite is certain to be the bumper sticker slogan of December-let us not forget to be grateful for another day that the furnace is working, our clothes are perhaps dated, yet clean, and our internet connection is still streaming high def. Join me in my twisted nature to read the doom and gloom and then find a reason to laugh.

Monday’s Doom and Gloom

Mike Harvey: Times must be hard, Americans are buying Spam again

Thomas Watkins, AP: In lean times SoCal gun owners trade arms for eats

William Pfaff: Remaking the World in America’s Image

Monday’s Crackpot Educator

Jim Fitzgerald, AP: Teacher sorry for binding girls in slavery lesson

Monday’s Funny

Kelly

As of September, the number of people using food-stamps grew to a record number of 31.5 million, up 17% from just last year.¹ Not surprising when you combine the expanding unemployment and foreclosure rates with the Washington crew taught philosophy that when the going gets tough, the government is the answer. After spending upwards of 3, 4, 5, trillion dollars on the bailout of every good ol’ boy on Wall Street, the public trough of food-stamps looks more and more like a dog dish. I say this, because though I am no cheerleader for entitlement programs, it becomes increasingly difficult to pick a bone with food-stamps when you compare the amount of money borrowed, printed, and created out of thin air that is being strewn about to shore up the base of the elite.

As Henry Paulson and Ben Bernake decide which CEO’s can line their pockets with corporate welfare, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will decide how much to increase the economic stimulus by so that the 1in 10 American families can purchase more soda. It is a disease, from the top to the bottom. And our so-called leaders are determined to keep everyone it their perspective roles.

The problem is that ‘we the people’ have become nothing more than ‘we the taxpayers’ and the bottom line-we, our children, and our grandchildren (those not yet born) are becoming more and more enslaved with each and every dollar spent.

The bailouts need to end, but we have less and less control over that at this point. What we do have control over now and forever is the mindset that we as Americans have adopted, that tells us we are entitled to anything and everything that we want. Understanding that the talk of “loosening credit” so that we can buy more Ford tough trucks and 46 inch wide screen televisions only adds to problem, putting us further and further in debt. It is as if our only job in life is to consume. Mindless consumers, you can bet that is exactly how they see us. And this same consumption of products extends to the food we consume.

Cases of Pepsi products, and bags of Frito Lay products (also under Pepsi) is always in the grocery cart of a food-stamp customer. Priorities? And they call the food-stamp programs anti-hunger. Because there is nothing like a can of Mountain Dew and a bag of Cheetos to satisfy those hunger pains. I speak from experience on this subject, not from assumption. I work in a grocery store and I am shocked every time I see this-$40 on cases of soda, bags of chips, boxes of doughnuts, and the list goes on and on. It would seem to me that if this is what one requires food-stamps for, then the need is not so great. Bread, meat, milk, vegetables, and fruit can all be had at a local food pantry. But, junk food as necessity can only be had through food-stamps.

This illustrates a complete reinforcement of adding debt to debt so that Americans can keep the consumption train on track. Allow me to reiterate- this is a disease, from the top to the bottom. And our so-called leaders are determined to keep everyone it their perspective roles.

Source: ¹http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4B28CB20081203?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews