The Smoking Argus

OAK BLUFFS, MASSACHUSETTS – According to sources close to President Obama; the President will nominate current Chairman of the FEDERAL RESERVE Board of Governors, Ben Bernanke to a second term. The announcement is expected to come on Tuesday morning.

Keynesian economists largely credit Chairman Bernanke with guiding the economy through the worst economic recession in fifty years. During the economic malaise, the FEDERAL RESERVE expanded a variety of programs and intervened into the economy utilizing new sweeping powers granted to the third Central Bank said to stave off a larger collapse. Consequently, the FEDERAL RESERVE pumped trillions of Reserve Note Dollars into the economy, thus increasing the national debt to its highest point in American history.

Central economic planners however, remain confident that Chairman Bernanke will know when to reel in the excess money supply in order to avert the possibility of inflation. While this appointment is likely to soothe the growing concerns on Wall Street, a multitude of challenges in addition to avoiding inflation remain unresolved.

Chief among the problems which remain a thorn in the side of Chairman Bernanke; the growing call for true transparency via a full audit of the FED’s books in dealings with other private Central Banks and foreign governments. Two bills, H.R. 1207 and its Senate companion, S. 604 currently seek to repeal the immunity granted to the FED on such transactions under Title 31 of the United States Code.

Moreover, the calm expressed by the Wall Street bankers and Keynesians in general may be short-lived depending upon what is contained within the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) second-quarter report for 2009.

UPDATE No. 1 – Official White House video of President nominating Ben Bernanke for a second term.

Joseph Marohl

Tax day (April 15th) is over, and we have been once again reminded that we Americans pay taxes, that we would rather not have to pay taxes, and that we would rather keep our own to look after our own—assuming our own is enough to do so.

I wish there were some way to have government services without paying government taxes—but my guess is that privateers in charge of police work and the monitoring of food and drug safety would be (though perhaps more efficient than the government) more expensive—and perhaps more susceptible to bribes and serving the interests of the wealthy over the common good. I say “more susceptible” because, obviously, there is some corruption already among law enforcement officers and government inspectors, though invariably bribes come from somewhere, usually from (surprise!) the private sector.

And the government has not usually been a good steward of our tax dollars or our trust. Unlike those who blame “special interests” such as welfare moms, tree-hugging environmentalists, and warm and fuzzy-thinking liberals everywhere, I tend to blame special interests like the corporate world, Wall Street, and, most especially, the war profiteers.

To be sure, World War II, the good war against fascism and genocide, made America the rich and powerful nation that it was for the remainder of the twentieth century. But unlike the present wars, started by Bush and his Republican and Democratic supporters, the Second World War was a war of cooperation between the people and the government. For instance, during the war 85 million Americans bought $185.7 billion in war bonds. Women and men unable to serve in uniform relocated to parts of the country they had never seen before in order to do office and factory work vacated by enlistees—my mother was one such person—and my father (of German heritage, who didn’t even speak English until the first grade) was quick to enlist in the U.S. Army. (Don’t even start the “real Americans” bullshit around me.)

(On the other hand, some American firms, even those active in building the “Arsenal of Democracy,” such as Ford Motors, General Motors, and Chase Manhattan Bank, had worked with the Nazis before the war and maintained operations in Germany even during the war.)

When the war ended, President Truman’s late 1946 executive order transferred the Manhattan Project’s research and facilities to private ownership—all to maintain the principle (I would say “fetish”) of free enterprise in the United States—while the U.S. federal government has continued sponsoring research in the private sectors ever since, and then buying back products for use in the military and other government sectors, often paying many times what such products would usually garner in the free market alone.

Nuclear energy has spawned growth in virtually every area of technology and science in the six decades since Truman. The profits of this one technology alone—had the American taxpayers been allowed to hold on to its patent, after huge wartime sacrifices by the people to fund this research—could perhaps reduce if not entirely erase the need for income taxes today.

Apart from the apocalyptic discoveries of the Manhattan Project, research in NASA, the U.S. military, and state university systems has contributed much to the prosperity of the nation. Costs of research failures have been swallowed by the government—and its taxpayers (“pork”). The successes, however, have been divvied out to private corporations—who, on top of receiving the fruits of research paid for by the taxpayers, pay a substantially lower tax rate than ordinary citizens, sometimes reduced to zero through tax loopholes and charitable deductions and the like.

In 1958, the federal creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created, through the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), the computer networking design that became, after it was commercialized in 1988, the World-Wide Web or the Internet. Only recently Time-Warner Cable planned to charge Internet users based on the amount of use—American Internet users, the ones who paid for the goddamned thing’s invention. Due to public and political outcry, Time-Warner backed down just this week.

NASA has financed the creation of new metal and glass alloys and spawned such spin-off merchandise as scratch-resistant lenses, wireless communications, freeze-dried foods, athletic shoes, virtual reality, microcomputers, laser technology, sports bras, hang gliders, quartz crystal timing, solar energy, digital imaging, the electric car, and a wide array of other useful and high-profit items.

Imagine if the American people, who financed this research through their taxes, also received at least some of the benefits of the worldwide marketing of the products stemming from this government-funded research.

Entertainment and organized crime have been the most profitable aspects of the free market not to be propped up with taxpayers’ money. And if I decided to be extra-cynical, I could add that one could make a pretty good argument that the obscenely profitable drug trade owes a debt to us taxpayers as well, through CIA operations in South America, the Vietnam war, and, most recently, Afghanistan, regaining its lead as the top producer of heroin just one year after the U.S. military deposed the Taliban.

So it seems to me that nationalization of industries directly indebted to government research and tax funding in the first place could be one way, along with more prudent budgeting by government leaders and more oversight by aware citizens, to reduce and perhaps even eliminate income taxes altogether.

Un-American. I know.

Joseph Marohl

I suppose we have Lenin and Stalin to blame for making “socialism” a bad word, and the cold war for making socialism sound antithetical to democracy and the American dream.

Still, it’s lazy usage of the word to accuse President Obama of being a “socialist,” as conservatives have been doing since last fall, under the spell of Joe the Plumber, just as calling George W. Bush a “capitalist” in the usual sense of the word misses the word’s defining points.

By all accounts Bush was a piss-poor investor and entrepreneur (still, to his credit, according to Snopes.com, he never actually said the French had no word for entrepreneur), having survived in all his pre-political business dealings on the coattails of his father and family connections, and, as U.S. President, turning a $200-billion surplus into $400-billion deficit, hardly a high watermark for ideological capitalism.

Likewise, Obama’s “socialism” benefits the Haves somewhat more directly than the Have-nots. Republicans call it “socialism” perhaps because it does not exclude the Have-nots entirely. More than Bush, Obama at least has experience in pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

It’s also a mistake to call the present collapse of capitalism as consequently and effectively socialism. “Capitalism” and “socialism” are indeed opposite terms, but it makes no sense to assume that the collapse of one is necessarily a triumph of the other. Lurking variables do appear to exist.

Arguably, the collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated a good bit of the mess Wall Street finds itself in now, so much depended on the cold war to prop up both sides of the “conflict,” just the opposite of what the long-held false dichotomy would suggest.

Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the frisson produced by tension between workers’ interests and investors’ interests has been the (tenuous, at best) basis of global economic strategizing. And the current economic collapse could just as easily swerve America to fascism or feudalism as to socialism or communism.

The stimulus packages, all varieties of them, are designed to keep gigantic financial institutions and multi-national corporations afloat. The collapse of these entities will cost jobs for ordinary working people, but probably no more so than the collapse of the European aristocracy did in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Yesterday, I watched Roberto Rossellini’s television film The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, recently available on DVD. It shows the French monarch’s building of Versailles and adoption of sumptuous finery in dress as deliberate ploys to stave off the inevitable forces of the bourgeoisie and democratic ideals, much as the Reagan-Thatcher high style in the 1980s, combined with sugary doses of nostalgia, were deliberate diversions from the faltering economy, which most people felt comfortable blaming Jimmy Carter for, mainly because he had dared to suggest wearing sweaters and turning down thermostats.

A culture built on superficial luxury and debt is a monarch’s and a dictator’s and a CEO’s bastion against forces of history, change, and equality.

Rossellini’s film begins showing ordinary workers commenting on how a good position with the king is affecting the amount of time husband can spend with wife, since work in the palace, though well compensated and prestigious, requires slavish devotion and little time for leisure … or a personal life.

When one loudmouth mentions that England had just successfully beheaded its king and seemed none the worse for wear, he is hushed up since all their income, including the loudmouth’s, is tied to the interests of the French aristocracy.

Such is the defense of the various stimulus packages, too—critics should shut up since “everybody has a stake in the fate of AIG.”

Calling the President a socialist seems a bit arch to me, since from FDR to Reagan to Clinton, Presidents of both parties have been propping up an untenable free market, seen as such by even leading capitalists like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century, with a variety of tricks co-opted from the old aristocracy.

FDR’s welfare programs are largely credited with saving the U.S. from Soviet-style communism on one hand and German- and Italian-style fascism on the other. Similarly, building Versailles kept the aristocracy in debt to the king (thus stifling political intrigues) and French workers too exhausted to analyze what exactly their own interests and rights were, much less rise up in protest against their oppressors.

In Western democracies, civil rights have been recognized when (and only when) civil disobedience and unrest have threatened profits or, worse, threatened to pull open the curtain and reveal the flimsy mechanisms that keep the “economy” blinking and buzzing.

The West has tended to stand up for human rights elsewhere in the world when its own economic interests have been threatened, though inevitably human rights and safety are invoked as the main rationales for war.

The stock market has been shaky for some time now, and though it has been the practice of the American right wing to blame this propensity for decline on insipient socialism and “big government,” it seems to me that big government, in the form of laissez-faire liberalism, has always worked more in the interest of preserving the viability and stability (or the illusion of these) of self-consuming industrial and capitalistic forces than in the interest of the American people in general.

Joseph Marohl

I don’t give a rat’s ass about the economy. Not really. It’s either way over my head or beneath my contempt. Let Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P suffer—Lord knows they have presided over the suffering of others—here and abroad—for quite a while now.

I have to echo the sentiment of Luis Caplan, physician to the poor in the Bronx for decades, now facing eviction as his retirement savings evaporate: Wall Street can “burn in hell.”

What amazes me about the current economic debacle is that, given the nation’s crumbling infrastructure—bridges, levees, highways, dams, public schools, borders, its military reduced to making or mail-ordering its own armor—nobody, nobody in the federal government and nobody in the private sectors, has found a way to turn these crying needs into jobs and opportunities for new productivity.

Instead, the focus has been on propping up Wall Street—financial institutions, in particular credit companies (read: glorified loan sharks) and wealthy speculators (read: smoke and mirrors) to encourage you and me to go to Disney World and break down and buy that widescreen TV we’ve had our eyes on, while CEOs continue pulling in 600 times our annual income, of which they pay a lower percentage in taxes—after bizarre deductions like African safaris passed off as legitimate business expenses.

It, all of it, is incredibly surreal.

So, in the spirit of the hour, I settle down to watch the new Criterion Collection DVD of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 The Exterminating Angel, a delightfully grim apocalyptic fantasy of extravagantly wealthy Mexican arts patrons who, after an evening of sipping champagne and toasting their own importance, find themselves unable to leave the room—even though nothing at all blocks the way.

As madness sets in, and as a bear and a small flock of sheep set up residence in the rest of the mansion, everyday people stand watching outside, equally impotent to storm the house and save the aristocrats.

At one point a doctor in the film tells his rich friends, now contemplating the murder of their hosts, whose hospitality they had just recently enjoyed and whom they now blame for their own failures of will: “Consider the terrible consequences of your actions. This vile act of aggression does not stand alone. It means the very end of human dignity and reverting to savage animals.”

Right now I can’t think of a better metaphor for the Senate fat cats stalemated by their own greed, cowardice, and lack of imagination. And of a populace, angry, frustrated, and scared, transfixed by the collapse of the American dream—by which I do not mean widescreen TVs.

Kudos to Criterion for timing this video release just right.

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

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

Allison Bricker

In an interview with Pat Campbell of KFAQ out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) revealed Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson as the person who was feeding Congress threats of Martial Law in America if the bailout failed to pass. This also sheds new light on Representative Brad Sherman’s (D-CA) comments on the house floor.

During the KFAQ radio interview, Pat Campbell said:

“Somebody in D.C. was feeding you guys quite a story prior to the bailout, a story that if we didn’t do this we were going to see something on the scale of the depression, there were people talking about martial law being instituted, civil unrest….who was feeding you guys this stuff?,”

Senator Inhofe responded saying:

“That’s Henry Paulson, we had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced.’”

Audio Clip of interview of Senator Inhofe (R-OK):

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Source(s): KFAQ 1170 am • C-Span

Allison Bricker

Secretary Henry Paulson took to the podium this morning to announce that the government has decided not to offer homeowners facing foreclosure any assistance and will instead just use the taxpayer bailout money, via the T.A.R.P (Troubled Asset Relief Program) program exclusively to purchase stocks in ailing banks in order to bolster their cash liquidity.¹ This is in stark contrast to what Secretary of Paulson said was the biggest threat at the time the legislation passed, homes in foreclosure.

Meanwhile,investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are still paying out bonuses to their bankers totaling $6.8 Billion and $6.4 Billion respectively.² Additionally, as Secretary Paulson effectively moved the goal posts regarding T.A.R.P., credit-card giant American Express gained approval from the Federal Reserve to become a “commercial-bank” thus opening the door for the credit giant access to bailout money.³

Fellow readers the snowball effect of moral hazard has indeed begun to gather critical mass. As predicted other struggling industries from a lobbyist group representing Hispanic Plumbers and Heating specialists⁴ desiring to be hired by treasury to maintain the purchased foreclosed homes to the faltering American auto industry, the leeches now have their smarmy hands out begging to be recipients of our hard earned tax dollars.

Finally, while this blogger never supported the bailout; partly due to my philosophy and partly based on my ingrained cynicism, this action by former Goldman Sachs employee, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, is dispicable and wholly indefensible.

How dare this plutocrat testify before Congress begging for speedy Congressional approval of the bailout bill based on the lie of helping down on their luck homeowners, when in fact it was destined for fellow plutocratic investment bankers. Shame on Congress for not seeing through this transparent scheme to secure the fortunes of Paulson’s fellow plutocrats. Shame on Senator McCain and President-Elect Obama for their lack of principles, vision, or judgement which could have wholly halted this hastily arranged scheme.

Fellow readers, we must, for the sake of our Republic, remove the private bankers from their throne of power over the American economy. If we do not, they will continue to wholly plunder and bankrupt our Treasury with their crafty corrupt schemes. The time is now upon us, to take a stand and begin the process to End the FED and break the bailout.

Source(s): ¹ CBS MarketWatch – “Text of Paulson’s Remarks on TARP • ² CBS News – “Hard Times, But Big Wall Street Bonuses • ³ The Press Association – “American Express to become bank” • ⁴ New York TImes “Lobbyists Swarm the Treasury for Piece of Bailout Pie”

Allison Bricker

Fellow readers my disdain for the junior Senator from Illinois emanates not from any of the numerous wild emails circulating the internet nor individuals attempting to link him to radical organizations in his distant or recent past. No, my principles will not allow me to vote for Senator Obama based solely on his record, his public comments, or the complete lack thereof.

First, his stated tax plan will raise taxes, not only on those making $250,000 or more, but all Americans. The good Senator’s stated threshold for those receiving a “tax reduction” changed several times over the last week from $250,000 to $200,000 to $120,000,¹ to $150,000 as of today². Additionally, it is imperative that we understand the reality behind his plan is actually a “tax credit” not a “tax cut”. Meaning, payroll taxes, the money taken from paycheck withholding, actually might go up according to the Obama plan. Laughably Senator Obama’s plan then calls for issuing a $500.00 dollar welfare government check.³

Moreover, while it is a populist sentiment to “soak the rich” in the form of higher income and corporate taxes, raising the corporate tax rate has historically always resulted in higher costs in the form of goods sold to the consumer, lower wages paid to employees, or less business reinvestment in the industry. Thereby leaving us as the recipients of what is referred to as an “indirect tax”.⁴

Even more deflating is that reading over Senator Obama’s official tax plan, yields not one cut in any specific government program but instead just an endless list of goodies promised for the “average” person. (If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is) Again this is not a difficult concept to understand, although some would like to pretend otherwise. Spending more than you take in results in one of two things: deficit spending or increased tax rates to offset the shortfall. It should be obvious to all of us now that living on a “credit card” does not work for individuals nor government. It puts us in the perilous situation of being solely at the mercy of our creditors. Also, no matter how many times Senator Obama calls me “selfish”⁵ or Joe Biden tells me paying taxes is “patriotic”⁵ will I be convinced that less money to feed and cloth our family thus resulting in more money to Washington makes for sound fiscal policy.

Secondly, Senator Obama voted yes for H.R.6304 “FISA Amendments Act of 2008″. H.R.6304 is the warrantless wiretapping bill illegally abused by the Bush administration to gut the remnants of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Senator Obama originally stated that he would not support any legislation which included blanket immunity for complicit telecom companies and administration officials⁶. The bill as enacted however does in fact provide complete immunity for all telecom companies who help the government listen in to American’s phone conversations as well as administration officials. Worse, the bill abolishes the original FISA court set up in 1978 and grants the district court administrative oversight authority.

Further, Senator Obama voted to renew the USA PATRIOT act⁷, originally passed at the behest of the Bush administration’s fake war on Terrorism. A 342 page behemoth printed at 5:00 in the morning, read by no one in Congress, and voted into law six hours later. The USA PATRIOT act gutted many inherent and civil liberties and gave the government unprecedented “tools” to intrude into our lives all under the guise of a fake enemy.

Next, the man who promises “change” illustrated his further lack of leadership and loyalty to the Constitution when he took the wet noodle stance of “undecided”⁸ in regards to his support for S.1959 the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” which currently resides in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Senator Obama is a member. This bill defines homegrown terrorism as:

“the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”

Further the bill goes on to define “ideologically based violence” as:

“the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs,”

Finally in a vagueness that only government can craft, the bill loosely defines violent radicalization as:

“adopting or promoting an extremist belief system,”

The question we need to ask is, who gets to define what is an extremist belief system? The centralized Federal government of course. The same Federal government that has repeatedly abused its powers as it has become less and less restrained by the shackles of the Constitution. No government, no President, needs this sort of authority in a “free society”.

Next, his support of the “Wall Street” bailout bill, approving the use of our tax dollars to bailout the corrupt criminal financiers and bankers who created toxic mortgage security packages and lost billions on their devil’s gamble.

Finally, his belief that “we need a Civilian National Security Force” to support the military. At best it sounds like another massive expansion of government, at worst another large erosion of our liberty.

There is no doubt in my mind that Senator Obama will win tomorrow’s election coronation and there is also no doubt that there will be “Change”. However, his record leads me to believe that it will not be change to benefit the Republic or restore the Constitution.

In conclusion, my vote will also not be cast in support of either major “party” candidate who offer only the illusion of choice. Instead my vote will go to Ralph Nader as a write in, seeing how the Democrats and Republicans in Indiana have succeeded yet again in continuing their prohibition of actual opposition candidates appearing on the ballot.

Yes my vote will be a protest vote, but at least my conscience will be clear when the time comes.

Source(s): ¹Washington Times “Obama camp changes tax-cut beneficiaries” • ²CNBC “Closing Bell” originally aired November 3rd, 2008 • ³ Washington TImes “Obama’s spread-the-wealth plan” • ⁴ The Tax Foundation • ⁵ The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin “Obama: Taxpayers Are Selfish” • ⁶ CNN video of Obama Press Conference • ⁷ Senate Roll Call Vote no. 29 – 109th Congress, 2005 • ⁸ The Indypendent “Obama “Undecided” on S. 1959″ • ⁹

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