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So many of us know in detail about all the false warnings and exaggerated claims that were used to justify the war in Iraq. By now, six years later, and after many books, reports, news stories and films (hopefully including my two books and film, Weapons of Mass Deception), we see the pattern of lies and deception. We realize what a fraud was committed against the American people and what its consequences have been for the people of this country, Iraq and Afghanistan.
For many of the righteous among us who thunder against these lies, there seems to be a lack of curiosity about the costly frauds that flushed our own economy down the toilet. Here too, there is a tendency to focus blame on politrick(ians), and not look at the larger fraud behind the fraud, in part , because most economists and media outlets minimize its role. First, its clear that, like on the war, government officials did mislead us, from original deregulators in the Carter-Reagan years to the financial “modernizers of the Clinton-Bush 2 era with their refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of their free market fantasies, the gutting of rules and regulations and embrace of a phony “ownership society.”
The world economy is now on the verge of a total systemic breakdown. The mechanism underlying the present credit-based system is now broken; for its two critical underpinnings, banks and government are not just broken - far more importantly, both are now literally flat broke.
I'm broke, no bread, I mean like nothing. - from Busted, lyrics by Ray Charles
Prior to the Great Depression, the collapse of the 1920s bubble unleashed a cascade of defaulting debt that buried lenders and borrowers alike. Then, governments were not bankrupt; today, governments are as broke as those they are attempting to save.It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
The tendency in the media and the Congress has been to blame the current depression on "stupid, greedy, and reckless" bankers. I believe that that is a mistake. I know bankers. They are not stupid; most of them are smart, and many of them are brilliant. If they are "greedy," it is largely so in the sense in which most Americans (most anyone, I imagine) could be called "greedy": they like money a lot. I read somewhere recently that bankers (a word I use loosely to cover financiers in general) derive their job satisfaction entirely from their monetary compensation, unlike other workers. But that is wrong. Rich bankers derive satisfaction not only from making a lot of money but also from a sense of outsmarting competitors, and in that respect they are not unlike highly paid athletes; in both cases the money the stars are paid do not merely enhance personal welfare, but also are indicators of relative performance. Money is a scorecard of success. Richard Posner Rudyard Kipling famously argued, If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs....you'll be a man. Of course, it is only in hindsight that one can be sure one is keeping one's head. Perhaps the Bankers really are Nietzchean Supermen? Perhaps intelligence is no longer manifested by following the wisdom of Daedelus but rather by flying high like Icarus?
Then again, perhaps not.
Now that the love affair with Obama is starting to wear off, it is time to Speak Out! Voters in California have just spoken out against Propositions 1A-1E (see California Voters Immediately Rewarded For Voting Down Propositions 1A Thru 1E) and now it's your turn.
It's time to take action on many issues, and the way to do that is to let Congress know how you feel. The first order of business is Ron Paul's Campaign Audit the Fed, Then End It!
And so it begins. Rep. Alan Grayson has distributed the letter below to all Democrats in the House and will use it to generate Democratic co-sponsorship for the HR1207 Bill, aka The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, allowing the GAO to audit the Federal Reserve, and also require a Fed report to Congress by the end of 2010. This is the critical first step for U.S. Taxpayers to regain some semblance of control over the insanity that happens each and every day over at the Federal Reserve. The status quo must change.
Discussion of the 50% Retracement Rule,
potential future price levels, time studies, key dates, Fibonacci, Gann, Astro numbers, Robert Rhea's Great Depression analysis.
“The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.”2 In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been “bailing like hell” for more than a year. Beginning in July 2007 when the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had speculated heavily in mortgage-backed securities signaled the onset of a major credit crunch, the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury Department have pulled out all the stops as finance has imploded. They have flooded the financial sector with hundreds of billions of dollars and have promised to pour in trillions more if necessary—operating on a scale and with an array of tools that is unprecedented.
Stacy Summary: The dollar’s slow, painful death in a thousand headlines continues. While the study tying muscle weakness and paralysis to cola consumption explains, for me, the oddness of American obesity. While there are certainly plenty of obese people in Europe, they tend to maintain a human form and shape, a firmness to their large size; while the obese Americans I have seen seem to take on a very droopy piles of fat that dangle off their bodies. Perhaps it has to do with the vast quantities of cola that is giving them huge quantities of calories while also weakening their muscles? And re: the ‘accidental millionaires’ on the run . . . they are half way to being billionaires, now they just need to adopt Donald Trump’s ‘Mental Projection’ Technique.’ But seriously, they should have just used mental projection to become ‘millionaires’ through bankruptcy as does Trump. And the entire US economy for that matter.
One of the conditions that defines a "banana republic" is a cavalier disregard for the rule of law by those in power. While ordinary citizens might pay a price for bad decisions or bad relationships -- or, simply, bad luck -- wherever they live, in a modern, civilized society, at least, they can usually have a measure of faith that wrongs can be righted and that what they have won't be arbitrarily taken away from them without compensation or a means of redress. Sadly, while few would have considered the possibility that America was in the banana republic category only a short time ago, developments like those described in the following post from Bob Brooks' Prudent Money blog, "The Car CZAR has Spoken," suggest that is no longer the case.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
