Kelly

Every day I wake up to pour another cup of hot coffee and delight in a hot shower is another day that I am grateful to have been born on American soil.  I know we’ve had it good.

But lately, every day as I pass my fellow Americans at the grocery store or the gas station  I wonder,  do they know what is going on?  Are they paying attention?  Do they see what I see?

It is not that long ago,  a time when Americans were beginning to get very comfortable with a slogan and a way of life that claimed you could have anything you wanted, even if it meant that you could not afford it.

Instant gratification became the crack of middle class America.  Credit line after credit line, a new car there and a new computer here, snowballed in to a dozen other must-have gadgets. Gadgets for him, gadgets for her, and an  XBox 360 for every boy and girl.  Not happy yet?  Spend more money.  How should we fight terrorism?  Spend more money.  Do you need a 3000 sq ft home to compete for a status symbol?  Spend more money.  No down payment?  We’ve got credit.

Is there more to it than that?  Sure.  There’s speculation, and brokers, and bankers, and Wall Street.  There’s interest rates, and deficits, and mortgage backed securities, sub-prime and ARM’s.  There’s the Federal Reserve, and the IMF, and a pyramid scheme from hell…  and a list of illiquid assets that would stretch for miles long.

“Who will fix this mess?” We ask.  And the fixers step in…

* With that in mind, I wanted to share the following video commentary, entitled  America’s Controlled Economic Implosion.   It presents how the American people are falling victim to the current tailspin of “fixing.”

The Smoking Argus

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute appears for a five minute interview on Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News. Mr. Celente and Glenn discuss the stimulus bill, the economic collapse, and the likelihood of a second American revolution.

On the web: The Trends Research Institute • The Glenn Beck Program

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

Mandy Hyndman

I am a machinist for a major corporation. Each day I am surrounded by a melting pot of—well mostly under-educated white folks. This is not to suggest that these people are stupid (not all of them anyway) but simply that they have little interest in a world not summed up on the evening news. Therefore I was delighted when a co-worker (we’ll call her Janice) initiated a conversation with me based on the derailment of the economy. I was explaining why I think it is a terrible idea for everyone to withdraw from the market at once in a blind panic (I mean come on, didn’t anyone see It’s a Wonderful Life?) when her eyes started to glaze over. She explained that she had pulled out her 401K because she needed enough money to sustain her family for five months, and the economy would never recover anyway.

Intrigued, I encouraged her to elaborate. According to Janice, the Armageddon (about which she is thrilled ) has arrived. Satan will soon fly down from the sky (I neglected to ask what he was doing up there) and promise protection to anyone who is willing to join him. These people will be marked (with a chip) and Satan will rule for 5 months before Jesus returns and blasts their faces off in righteous anger. In the meantime Janice and her boyfriend plan to hide in the woods and live off of the land until Jesus (I’m guessing by way of some kind of bat-Jesus signal) tells them it’s safe to come out. I asked why she needed money if she were going to be living in the woods and she said “Just in case.” Just in case Jesus accepts bribes? Just in case they run out of toilet paper? I’m pretty sure woodland creatures don’t accept US currency. Come to think of it, does anyone these days?

Do I actually live in a world where people refuse so vehemently to accept reality that they must create scenarios even an intelligent five year-old would dismiss as fairy tale? I do, don’t I? Jesus Christ. Everybody be sure to put on clean underpants in case logic and reason have let me down and the Armageddon is actually here, that way those of us left behind won’t have to look at your righteous skid-marks.

Joseph Marohl

Seventy-nine years ago this month the stock market crashed big, just a year after the election that won Herbert Hoover the Presidential election. The US economy seized up, and the Roaring Twenties died down to an asthmatic wheeze. Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.

As Commerce Secretary in Calvin Coolidge’s Presidency, Hoover had gained visibility in ’27, through his quick, effective, and humane response to the Great Mississippi River Flood, which breached levees, swamped millions of acres, and made thousands of people homeless.

A pro-regulation, anti-laissez faire Republican, President Hoover revoked private oil leases on government-owned land, closed tax loopholes for the wealthy, and unsuccessfully pushed for lower taxes for low-income Americans. He worked hard for Native American rights, reversing a long history of abuses—not least of all, he chose Charles Curtis, a descendant of Native people, raised on the Kaw reservation, as his Vice President.

By today’s standards he would probably be called a liberal—or, at the very least, a compassionate conservative.

Still, he supported volunteerism over government intervention to address the nation’s vexing social problems—as wealth accumulated into the hands of fewer and fewer of the privileged. To assuage Americans’ fears of losing jobs to immigrants, he forced half a million Mexicans to return to Mexico—accomplishing on a smaller scale (roughly one-fortieth) what right-wingers today dream of. Under his watch, the crash of the stock market became the single worst financial disaster in US history.

Strange and somehow funny, isn’t it, how, despite 80 years in between, the issues that have dominated the George W. Bush Presidency mirror—in distorted funhouse fashion—those that occupied the Hoover White House?

Bush, of course, is famously anti-regulation, pro-oil, and slow to respond to natural disasters. But it’s interesting how the issues facing these two Presidents cut across each other.

When the Great Depression struck, people who lost their homes built ramshackle shacks and erected tents, building neighborhoods of impoverished men, women, and children in public areas of the major US cities, from the Port of Seattle to Central Park in New York.

Charles Michelson, chief of publicity for the Democratic National Convention back then, dubbed the impromptu housing projects “Hoovervilles.”

Howard Zinn wrote of this period,

“A socialist critic would … say that the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs. The result of all that: depression for many of its people, and periodic crises for almost everybody. Capitalism, despite its attempts at self-reform, its organization for better control, was still in 1929 a sick and undependable system.”

This past spring, BBC News covered new tent camps—dubbed “Bushvilles”—popping up across the nation as a result of the rash of mortgage foreclosures. The parallels are, of course, startling.

Nobody wants a replay of the Great D, and it’s unfair to single out the Bush Administration for blame on problems that have been in the making bipartisanly for decades—though arguably Bush et al. have blithely pushed matters over the edge.

Bush’s “ownership society” seems to be crashing on our never-too-terrorized-to-go-shopping heads.

Source(s): ¹Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper, 2003.

Allison Bricker

“Would you like fries with that unsecured loan?” This may not be too far off from reality now that the Federal Reserve has stepped in and decided to become the preferred drive-up ATM of multinational corporations.  The Federal Reserve has done such, due to Wall Street investment banks and global central banks utterly refusing to extend anymore of these loans, a.k.a Credit Crunch.

Yes, fellow readers, the Federal Reserve, under Section 13: Sub-Section 3 of the Federal Reserve Act (1913/Amended)¹, has decided to set up the Commercial Paper Funding Facility. The what you ask? Well let us see what the Federal Reserve says in its press release dated October 7th, 2008.²

* Green text denotes my attempt to decipher the double-speak legalese that follows.)

By eliminating much of the risk (i.e. bypassing the free market) that eligible issuers (private investment banks) will not be able to repay investors (your 401k) by rolling over (extending credit limit, delaying repayment) their maturing commercial paper obligations, this facility (the FED) should encourage investors to once again engage in term lending (more credit, more debt, more credit) in the commercial paper market. Added investor demand should lower commercial paper rates (interest rates) from their current elevated levels (free-market check/balance forcing interest rates high meant to stop businesses reliance on the endless cycle of debt to pay bills) and foster issuance of longer-term commercial paper.(bunches of more credit not due until a future generation and hey who cares we’ll all be dead) An improved commercial paper market will enhance the ability of financial intermediaries to accommodate the credit needs of businesses and households (perpetuating the addiction to debt and living beyond one’s means).

If this makes your head spin, let us just sum it up this way. “Commercial Paper” is an I.O.U written by Multi-National Corporation A, sold to Wall Street investment bank/global central banks for large sums of money so Multi-National Corporation A can pay its bills and employees. All this money is loaned from Wall Street investment bank/global central banks solely  based on a promise to repay; backed up by no real asset, i.e. a factory, a cement truck, etcetera.  Most of the time however, instead of demanding repayment of the loan, the investment bank merely rolls over the debt to be repaid at a later time with a higher rate of return and then stuffs them into their clients mutual funds and other crafty Wall Street “security instruments”.  Therefore in no time at all, a promise to repay $100 million becomes $150 million to $250 million and so on and so on.

So now that we know what “Commercial Paper” is, let us look at how the Federal Reserve will “fix” this problem. With the purchasing of Commercial Paper paper being refused by the banks, the Federal Reserve has put on its super hero cape (made from the finest Chinese silk, funded by the taxpayer of course) and has offered to buy up these I.O.U’s for companies the Fed decide “worthy”.   This effectively puts the Federal Reserve in a god-like position to determine which businesses survive while other businesses fail.

Don’t you just love the smell of a predatory market shell game in the morning?  We shall see the set up for mid to large sized Main Street/regional businesses to be absorbed into multi-national conglomerates or deemed a possible upstart competitor and thus allowed to fail.

Fellow readers, the international banking cartel cares not about Main Street. The Plutocrats who reside as the Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve’s 7 member Board of Governors (appointed by President of the United States, confirmed by Senate) are solely concerned with amassing and consuming as much for themselves, the rest of us be damned. We must realize they look at us with scorn as parasites to be used up like any other commodity, you know, “human resources”.

Fellow readers, please do this very sleepy blogger a favor and do not misconstrue the aforementioned as Capitalism nor any semblance of a Free Market.  It is the power brokers practicing their brand of Greediocracy.  Let us do all we can to speak clearly, loudly, and in stark opposition to allowing these criminals to bypass the Constitution and amass any more power on their insidious march towards Feudalism 2.0

Source(s):¹http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section13.htm •
²http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20081007c.htm

Rob Obringer

As a kid, I always watched the news with my parents. It was a ritual every night, just before dinner. When I would watch, I would usually zone out until they got to an appealing story, or something about sports, or some weird/wacky item. When the economy was discussed I would definitely tune out. Words like “recession”, “layoffs”, and “unemployment” never meant anything to me. I could care less. As it should be for a kid, I guess. Even during my early 20′s, after 9/11, I had just started a “real” job, but economic issues didn’t hit me, and didn’t concern me. I always had the feeling, as a lifelong optimist, that it will get better.

But now, with a family, a career, and being at a time in my life where I think I should start feeling more secure and stable, I can’t help thinking all day…How close are we?

How close are we to chaos across our country? How close are we to massive layoffs? How close are we to people running the streets and going nuts like we see in movies? How close are we to conditions that occurred during the Great Depression? How close are we to not being able to provide everything for our children, what they need and should have?

I feel it inside me that we are getting closer. I know we are closer than we were a few years ago.

The only benefit I can take away from this experience of living and feeling this turmoil is that I want to learn from it. I want to feel more secure. I want to remember how grateful I am to have a job and be able to provide. I want to remember how grateful I am to have a family, our kids, and what they mean to me.

Hopefully our country can learn as well. Check itself, realize we aren’t where we should be, realize that everything got a bit out of hand. That puts a bigger burden on our government to see us through these tough times. We need to have leaders that realize how close we are, and can feel it, so they have the urgency to get us away from there. It’s amazing to me that during a Presidential election right in the middle of this economic turmoil, one of the candidates wants to get ugly and nasty and stretch the truth about personal histories and associations. Most of the time, I don’t mind hearing that kind of stuff, it’s politics. However, when we are in truly tough economic times that could and probably will get worse, don’t turn away from the issues. Talk about them. Tell me how you are going to help fix them. Tell me how you are going to help take this feeling of uncertainty away from me. Tell me how you are going to make us all feel that we aren’t close…

Kelly

It’s difficult to imagine. It’s difficult to imagine… on a day… like today, where we were officially distracted by the games that were played, the baseball and football and I suppose Wall Street too. It’s difficult to imagine… when autumn is upon us and doing exactly what Mother Nature intended, the air is so crisp and the hot apple cider with a cinnamon stick. It’s difficult imagine… when the big box stores are ready and willing to sell us their goods, the make-up, the costume, the candy corn too. The goblins and ghouls are the first display…quick; touch it before it goes away. It’s difficult to imagine… when you’re reading these words on a flat screen with high speed from Visa to you. Google is there, one click and it will appear. We have iTunes and BlueRay and HDTV. We have Myspace and Facebook and Youtube today. We have time to have these thoughts, to sit and ponder what next. We have time to trash, bash, and rehash the bailout we bought. We can sub-prime and credit crunch for a little while longer… perhaps.

But, when that day comes, will we know that it’s here? Will the bell toll? Will the whistle blow? The sound that we fear. At age 13 I thought by now we would be driving though the sky, a world like that cartoon, not the Flintstones you know. By age 21, there were still no flying cars, just planes and those buildings that stopped standing on that one day. Now, 30 is near, with a family and a dog, and now more than ever it seems there is something to fear.

700 billion…and more sure to come… keep printing, keep spending, cause when this baby falls apart who will be left standing?

Allison Bricker

Today, the first full business day since the passage of the bailout, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over 800 points before trading off its low to close the day at  minus 369.8 points or -3.58%.  As Congressional hearings were called, the criminal financiers – under oath, sought to blame everyone but themselves for their shady securitization packages.  As Congress grandstanded on television, grilling their CEO friends for the benefit of the media, the financial talking heads continued their campaign of condescending tones against us “regular people”.

For a moment, let us consider, that perhaps there is a silver lining in the collapsing ponzi scheme unfolding live on the idiot box and within the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Perhaps through this collapse, we “those regular people” scolded for our lack of understanding, will find motivation in place of our dwindled 401k.

Perhaps now, we the People, will find the moxie to rise up and call for the abolishment of the corrupt incestuous entity known as the Federal Reserve, our nation’s 3rd Central Bank.

We, the “regular people” knew twice before; rather quickly in fact,  that the first two Central banks established by the international banking cartel were of the utter detriment to the republic. As such neither the First or Second Banks of the United States had their 20 year charters renewed.  Unfortunately, when the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was voted on two days before Christmas whilst most of Congress was home for the holidays, there was no limit of 20 years tied to the new central bank.  Thus for 95 years the 3rd Central Bank has bound American generation after American generation with perpetual unyielding debt, coupled with a 97% devaluation of our Dollar.

It is time my fellow readers, that we heed President Jefferson’s warning :

It is time my fellow readers, to begin a campaign of calling into talk radio, writing letters to the editor, writing or emailing our elected officials, supporting Congressional candidates who run on abolishing the Federal Reserve and a return to sound money.

If we do not, our Republic will most assuredly fail.  Our posterity will inherit an America wholly different from the country we enjoyed throughout our childhoods and early adulthood.  It will, my readers, be a nation cast aside by the criminal bankers as they flock to exploit the new rising empire of China and a renewed Russia.

Make no mistake, abolishing the Federal Reserve will not solve all our ills, as we have indeed allowed the Constitution and our inherent rights to dwindle as the supreme law of the land.  However, the end of the Federal Reserve will unshackle Americans from the economic slavery of perpetual debt and thus wrest control away from the financiers who believe not in free markets, not in Capitalism, but a Plutocratic Oligarchy where we the American People are their insurance policy of last resort.

We must send them a message, that their claim is indeed DENIED!

Reclaim the Republic

Don’t tread on Me!

Source(s):“The Creature from Jekyll Island : A Second Look at the Federal Reserve” -by G. Edward Griffin - ”The Jacksonians versus the Banks – POLITICS IN THE STATES AFTER THE PANIC OF 1837″ by James Roger Sharp,MCMLXX COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK & LONDON

Allison Bricker

In the self aggrandizing banter following last night’s Vice-Presidential debate, the punditocracy’s own, Chris Matthews committed a giant verbal faux pas.  As soon as the word “depression” left his lips, Mr. Matthews froze. Viewers could literally witness his face glaze over, trying to process the gravity of his own words.  Mr. Matthews then attempted a course correction, nervously fumbling over, “recession”.

Make no mistake, now that this bailout bill has passed and is on its way to the President, our American republic is headed towards a multi-year economic depression, instead of just a shorter less painful recession. Contrary to the condescending tones from the financial “gurus” about how “We the average People” just do not understand the complexities or necessity of the bill, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that you do not fix a debt problem by shoveling on more debt.

Americans knew all too well twice before that central banks were bad for the country.  Both “The First and Second  Banks of the United States” were ripe with corruption, caused wild speculation in markets and, were not renewed at the times their 20 year charters came up for review before Congress¹.

However, unlike “The Third Bank of the United States”, i.e “The Federal Reserve” the first two central banking schemes utilized sound money to back the currency.  Where once the American Dollar bore the words “Gold” or Silver Certificate”, meaning the Dollar was legally convertible into actual gold or silver on demand of the bearer.  Today’s Dollar only bears “Federal Reserve Note” on its face, and are thus nothing more than paper backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

From 1800 to 1933 the average daily price of one Troy ounce gold, chugged along steadily at $20.00/ounce². Thus a Dollar in 1800 basically bought the same amount of goods in 1912. However, on March 9, 1933, in an effort to “stabilize agricultural crop prices”, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt signed Presidential Executive Order 6102 which invoked his authority to make it unlawful to own or hold gold coins, gold bullion, or gold dollar certificates³. By the end of that year gold rose 62% to $32.00/Troy ounce.

As the “Great Depression” continued, the government tried all sorts of measures, such as the 1933 “Agricultural Adjustment Act”⁴. The AAA even paid a subsidy to farmers to plow under their crops in order to “stabilize crop prices”, whilst 7 million+ Americans starved.  All so “Prices” could remain stable on the “open” market. Only after inflating the currency even further via the “Lend/Lease” scheme of World War II and being in charge of the massive rebuilding of a devasted Europe, would America climb out of the “Great Depression”.

Following World War II, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Government continued its effort to move totally away from a sound currency.  Finally, in 1973, President Nixon put the final nail in the coffin, and removed the dollar completely, 100% off the Bretton Woods gold standard⁵.

Since that day, our money’s value has been based on one thing; the peoples ability to perpetuate the borrow/repay cycle needed to sustain a wholly fiat currency.  This time however we are propping up “home prices” by buying up these failed mortgage backed securities at an over valued price, from the criminal financiers who recklessly packaged said instruments in the first place.  It sometimes seems like we never learn, and hence why my philosophy on the importance of history is: “You cannot know where you are going, if you do not know where you have been.”

Please do not misconstrue my analysis that we are headed into another depression as yet another condescending statement to “We the People”.  The difference now is that in previous borrow/repay cycles, the creditors were fellow Americans, in the form of local banks, business, etcetera, etcetera.  However, now the creditors are wholly foreign as we no longer produce much of any real assets,  instead we consume.  We consume all the wonderful distracting gadgets, such as plasma televisions, iPhones, and clothing to name a few.

In the final analysis, let us say you take a credit card with a $50,000.00 limit and spend until the card is completely maxed to its limit.  You then fall behind on a couple of “minimum payments on the National Debt”.  Which leads you to the bright idea to call the credit card company and explain to them to raise your credit limit so you can buy/invest in some more consumable not durable goods or real assets, which will then allow you to make a profit to pay off the originally purchased items “sometime in the future” – maybe.

What do you think that credit card company would say? This is exactly what this bailout is in essence requesting.  However, even more despicable, is that this bill will print the money out of thin air and then try to sell these Treasury I.O.U’s to our master creditor, the Chinese government.

My fellow Americans, this is the situation we now find ourselves in thanks to the wholly uncaring, selfish, corrupt, and deviant government that runs amok in Washington.  It spread its “Consume until bloated” mentality to both the state governments and the American people.  Unfortunately, the “United States Credit Card” has officially just been Declined” for the inability to repay.  My fellow readers, our country is bankrupt.  Perhaps Mr. Peter Schiff’s words from an interview on Thursday says it more succinctly, stating “we’re screwed” in response to the question, “What will happen if the bailout passes?”  Mr. Schiff, as our loyal readers already know, warned us two years ago exactly where this current debt based bubble was taking the U.S. economy.

Unfortunately, I have no direct answer on how to solve this crisis.  If our family was wealthy enough we would invest in foreign gold and silver markets.  However, this malfeasance threatens our Republic’s very existence, and even if that opportunity were available, it is only a matter of time before the government outlaws the possession of gold yet again.

Perhaps there will be a groundswell of Americans finally ready to repeal the charter of the Federal Reserve and thus a demand to return to sound money.  If not, there is always that tree, and it seems more and more to be in need of a serious refreshment.

Source(s): ¹ Central banking functions of the United States Treasury, 1789-1941 published: 1943- ² World Gold Council – ³The American Presidency Project/University of California – ⁴The Depression in the United States–An Overview/University of Illinois – ⁵Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, Published 1997 – “Purchasing Power of Federal Reserve Notes”/Consumer Price Index/Bureau of Labor Statistics