inflation (16)

A Tell of Democratic Leadership -Detroit

A Tell of Democratic Leadership.

There once was a great America city, where one on six American jobs were related to the businesses headquartered in this city of 2 million people. Detroit!

Now, under democratic leadership it has 700K citizens, 78,000 abandoned buildings, 58 minute wait time for a policeman, very high crime and murder rate , strict gun laws and the largest city in US history to file for bankruptcy.

Just think Obama and the democrats want to lead us, but to where and how bad will it get. Remember, Obama said his policies will make energy prices skyrocket, while we sit on more energy reserves that known in the world. EPA and other federal agencies issuing more new rules than ever before and a tripled federal deficit while printing 80 billion USD every month, propping up Wall Street. Manipulated inflation and unemployment numbers and not to be forgotten Obama care. I know Obama and the democrats can do for every American city what they have done for so many others, including Detroit.

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Obama and Lew the Perfect Fiscal Storm

By Gregg Houlden

Every Investment Banking professional including myself look upon Lew's nomination with little less than despair. Not really for our personal wealth, as we can as easily operate from London and Singapore as NY or LA, but for the average working American. Already the effects of Obama's amateur and ideology led economic management is beginning to bite. (4th Quarter GDP Estimate Reduced to .8% from 1.5%). 

What does the Lew appointment mean to the average American? In my professional opinion, two major problems. An almost certain further downgrade by S&P and Moody's probably in Q1 13 will deliver higher interest rates. That means every Credit Card, Mortgage or Loan will become more expensive. The second point is more direct and will hit the middle class with a double whammy, the long term effects on manufacturing and large scale employers of Obama Care and increased payroll tax will be felt. I expect certain initial indicators to flag deeper problems. Already, Amex has decided to shed 5,500 jobs. I expect other Finance Houses to follow suit as they outsource to London or other destinations with more corporate friendly administrations. Manufacturing already burdened by the Unions and Obama's leftist led FMCS will once again to look to globalization to reduce costs. Don't blame the company as will the Democrats and Obama, blame academic theory meeting objective reality. 

Basic concept; If company A with US Costs can make and sell a widget for $3.30 and company B (in India or China) without Obamacare and unionized costs makes and sells the same widget for $0.50 even the most patriotic organization will go with B.  

In November, Obama lied, cheated and enabled by a barely competent MSM deceived the electorate. I will only make the 2% pay more. Well we had already globalized our portfolios Mr President. Now we see the first hike on the middle class, a payroll tax increase of around $100-200 per pay check. As Obama ramps up his spending as he only sees ideological value rather than fiscal. Basic economics say, the revenue to fulfil his grand schemes cannot come from the 2% even at 100% tax. It has to come from the 47% of working Americans. Now with a sycophant like Lew as Treasury Secretary, Obama's stupidity, lack of empathy and downright narcissism will have no voice of reason. Spend, Spend, Spend will lead to a tank in the dollar. S&P analysts will have conniption fits over the worsening debt ratio and economic indicators. I project by Q1 2014, if Obama is not stopped by the GOP House, our S&P rating will be A+. (Good is AAA BTW, as we used to be) Our bonds and debt (TBonds) will have to yield anything up to the Spain and Portugalesque 6% which will knock on to a 6 -11% jump in your personal interest payments. 

What really becomes a problem at that point is what economists call “Confidence”. When confidence fails in an economy buying ceases, investment halts and people don't trust anything. Banks fail, corporations saddled with debt and increasing labor costs close or relocate and USA Inc goes bankrupt.

Obama is a rank amateur that's too stupid and too arrogant to know his own limitations and seek competent help to mitigate the deficiency. We need our GOP leadership to change and replace Speaker Boehner with a competent and strong leader who will resist and slow the Obama disaster.  In effect save America from Obama and his foolish and childlike policies.

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          “Our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Obama have united on policies that saw the printing of new dollars to the tune of 15.1 X our 2008 circulating currency; and then later doubled that amount by running the money printing presses non-stop. In an ordinary country operating by ordinary rules, America would be beset by hyper-inflation and the 2011 dollar would be worth about 3.2 pennies-worth of the 2008 dollar. We’ve been saved by the fact that the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency . . . that lucky saving situation will soon change . . . the day of reckoning is upon us.”

 

“. . . the American Dollar will be yesterday’s news and those holding dollars and any American paper instruments (like bonds) will be up a certain infamous creek without locomotion. The price of everything in dollars would then jump spectacularly. Gas might reach $16 or $17 per gallon. Eggs? Maybe about the same.  Overnight the standard of living of all Americans would drop to about the 1930’s level as the cost of necessities would become prohibitive and luxuries would be . . . well, rare luxuries again.”
 
American Dollar to Go
The Way of the Dinosaurs?
 
                The seedy little bearded men with wild-eyes carrying signs reading “The End is Near” have stepped out of the magazine cartoons and will soon surround us.  The apocalyptic event foreseen long ago, conceived in progressivism and dedicated to the socialist dream is now approaching her “due date.”   The gold dollar is long dead, long-live the Obama B.S. paper dollar worth 1/3 of a cent in 1913 money.  Hail the new AmeriKa!**
For all but 27 of the last 98 years, progressive politicians have owned the Oval Office. For 93 of those years they have controlled at least one and usually both chambers of Congress (the House and Senate). America in the next fifteen months, probably sooner, will receive an ugly slap across the face; forced to pay for those sad voting truths as our Keynesian chickens get swallowed alive by the voracious hawks of economic reality. Are we talking about the end of the American Way of Life? Short of a miraculous and virtually instantaneous return to original principles and virtues (meaning fiscal-conservativism; Constitutional-conservativism; simple common sense; and drastically reduced government size and scope and interference), that is precisely what we mean: the end of America and the beginning of AmeriKa, the decadent banana-republic socialist state we’ll all come to know and despise. Let’s return very briefly to the beginning of our woes . . . .
With the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the presidency. There was no Oval Office then; his successor William Howard Taft was the first to occupy that room. TR was a believer in progressivism (the doctrine that we must progress beyond and abandon the “outdated and ill-conceived U.S. Constitution” if we are to make progress toward our earthly Utopia). What does that mean in real life, your life? What’s progressivism about? Roosevelt did some powerful things that certainly in retrospect seem like they well needed doing. He began the National Park system; he created the Panama Canal; he dramatically expanded and modernized the nation’s armed forces especially the Navy which he sent out upon an ostentatious world tour to flex our muscle while sailing “quietly but carrying a big stick.”
TR is now one of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore and regarded as one of our greatest presidents. So what’s so bad about progressivism? It wasn’t particularly what he did, but more HOW he did it. Teddy commandeered part of a larger country then known as Colombia by creating a revolution there and next removed part of Colombia. He then named the resulting isthmus-nation “Panama” and began dredging a canal there which was owned by the United States. His expansions of the military and creation of the national park system were largely a product of TR’s powerful personality side-stepping and by-passing Congress and the Constitution. It was a benevolent progressivism for the most part, but progressivism nonetheless.
Our first truly progressive and ugly-progressive President was Woodrow Wilson and since the 1913 creation of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve Banking System and Wilson’s dramatic expansion of government reach and largesse we’ve largely been a progressive nation ever since. The wages of Wilson’s sins added to those of ultra-progressives Hoover, FDR, Johnson, Carter, and Obama(36 years so-far and Obama’s seeking re-election); and several semi-progressive presidents; and a virtual unending list of progressive Congresses and we’ve now as a predictable result piled up a national debt of $15 TRillion. We’ve played fast and loose with UNfunded liabilities of $112+ TRillion (Social Security, Medicare, and the federal side of Medicaid – not to mention all the welfare state which isn’t even included in that figure) for a total of ($127+ TRillion) 2.2 X the entire planet’s gross domestic product. 
Since March, 2009, our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Obama have united on policies that saw the printing of new dollars to the tune of 15.1 X our 2008 circulating currency; and then later doubled that amount by running the money printing presses non-stop. In an ordinary country operating by ordinary rules, America would be beset by hyper-inflation and the 2011 dollar would be worth about 3.2 pennies-worth of the 2008 dollar causing immense consternation at the grocery store, gas pump . . . everywhere. We’ve been saved by the grace that the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency . . . a lucky saving situation that will soon sadly change . . . the day of reckoning is upon us.
Understand this: we’re NOT talking about the 2007-to-present financial crisis, but referring to a situation that’s related to it, but infinitely worse. We’re talking about 98 years worth of Keynesian chickens come home to roost. We’re talking about the Bernanke-Obama inflationary epoch coming home to roost; we’re talking about the collapse of the American dollar. In case you don’t understand the word “Keynesian,” let’s quickly clear that up: the Brit John Maynard Keynes’ back in the teens and 1920’s came up with theories that totally defied the collected economic wisdom of the centuries and specifically Adam Smith’s massive tome The Wealth of Nations. In line with the Fabian Society of England (the progressive British fathers of American Progressivism) Keynes said that government spending was an unmitigated GOOD that could create prosperity at will.  Government spending was the key to Utopia. Every semi-totalitarian state gained carte blanche from Keynes to spend whatever it took to make the powers that be happy.  Every democracy gave progressives the power to promise the people anything and everything to keep their sick policies; and sick leaders in office perpetually.  Even though Keynes later in his life recanted and admitted that Smith was correct and his own theories dead wrong, most governments around the world and here in the United States have been enveloped in a binge of government spending ever since.
Around 1949 those policies cost England, Keynes’ homeland, its ownership of the world’s reserve currency the British Pound Sterling after  it had held that lofty position for over two hundred years . . . since then England has been shrouded in one financial disaster after another . . . after being THE global military super-power pretty much since 1588 and owning the most trusted money on the planet for roughly 2 ¼ centuries. A far worse fate awaits the United States barring an extraordinary miracle because America under Bernanke and especially under Obama has abused the laws of economics far worse than the Brits ever did. What precisely are we talking about?
The nation is now past the point where a long predictable “economic rebalancing” is overdue. Recently our nation’s credit ranking was dropped for the first time in our history. The point where that should have happened was actually reached in 1973 when Richard Nixon let the dollar “float” against gold and against other countries’ money and refused to honor our country’s fiduciary promises to people who bought American Treasury bonds. Things have gotten much, much worse for foreign-holders of American currency since 1973 and much, much, much, much, much worse for American holders of dollars ever since. 
Here’s one very quick example of why this happened. Besides all the foolish government spending of borrowed money (we were the world’s greatest creditor nation two generations ago and are now the world’s largest DEBTOR), the government also stepped into the free markets and told banks and businesses how they must run their operations. Progressive Jimmy Carter and his progressive Congress in 1977 passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77) which for the first time required (FORCED) mortgage lenders to knowingly make bad loans to unqualified home loan applicants. Since that time the rate of suspect loans (with 3% down payment or less) has risen from 0.24% in 1977 to 34.25% of all mortgages in 2007 when our financial crisis (the sub-prime loan crisis) began. 
That amounted to a 1,425% multiplication of the rate of suspect loans. Worse, instead of giving 3%-down loans to ex-Army officers enrolled in college under the GI Bill (as they were back in 1975), under the 4th Bill Clinton expansion of CRA ’77 (his 1998 “steroid version” expansion) 0%-down loans were being granted to people without jobs; without good credit; whose only “income” was food stamps; and even to illegal aliens. Many of these people were put into $400,000 homes on the belief that home prices could only rise and they could later sell out and make a profit: a monstrously stupid progressive spread-the-wealth scheme. This was all pure Keynesian prosperity according to the progressive manifesto. The result is history, sad, sad history. Today our woes are so bad that even if all Americans were taxed 100% of our earnings we could NOT repay the national debt ($15 TRillion and growing). As far as the nation’s UNfunded liabilities ($112 TRillion+ and growing) and the welfare state (who knows what the cost of the welfare state is since under Obama just SNAP -- the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program commonly called “food stamps” --recipients have reached well over 40 million souls), so your guess on the full size of all these government spending and government interference boondoggles is every bit as good as my guess might be . . . .
The bottom line? Expect (unless miracles occur) the world to change back to the gold standard; or possibly a combination gold standard and a shift to gold-back currencies like the Swiss Franc or the Kruggerand; or most likely a digital-based gold standard for conducting the world’s international trade. That is, the American Dollar will be yesterday’s news and those holding dollars and any American paper instruments (like bonds) will be up a certain infamous creek without locomotion. The price of everything in dollars would then jump spectacularly. Gas might reach $15 or $16 or even $20 per gallon; eggs, maybe about the same. Overnight the standard of living of all Americans would drop to about the 1930’s level as the cost of necessities would become prohibitive and luxuries would be . . . well, rare luxuries again . . . You know those problems with pensions some people have had recently . . . those problems will soon seem like a pimple under Miss America’s evening gown: Bad day at Black Rock.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
**            What can you do; what SHOULD you do to avoid AmeriKa becoming your own new lifestyle? The question is TOO BROAD and encompasses your safety (expect food riots in big cities) and perhaps even your nationality . . . wealthy Americans will exit in droves taking their job-creation abilities with them probably mostly to Canada and Australia and the U.K. Here’s the minimum you should consider: if you can afford it, GOLD would be a great idea.  Gold could see $12,000-$15,000 an ounce soon.  But every thinking American ought now to invest in “junk silver.” Either the 40% (1965-1970) or 90% (1964 and earlier) silver coins will do nicely. Silver has risen faster than gold this last decade and has, according to experts still a greater upside than gold. Silver is also much cheaper and far for convenient for every-day transactions. Won’t it be nice to be able to pay for a decent meal with a 40% silver quarter or a 90% silver dime rather than huge amounts of paper currency . . . however, Gresham’s Law (“Bad money drives good money out of circulation.”) would remind you that prudently you should spend your paper before you use any silver at all. The government would smarten up eventually and forbid flight from the country . . . with gold, palladium, platinum or silver or even numismatic coins . . . and even seek to “inspect” people’s safe deposit boxes as a Brave New World ushers in . . .  by the way while this reality is galloping toward us, MSNBC's Chris Mathews on his Hardball show (which only throws marshmallow questions to progressive politicians) is accusing the TEA Party of turning the Senate and House into zombies by "body-snatching."  So the only sane ideas in politics are being likened to horror flicks . . .  my, my . . . .
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           It’s been less than two weeks since the Republican House leadership caved into President Obama and received just $392 million in real cuts for the fiscal 2011 budget; and just two days since the Standard & Poors bond rating services listed a negative outlook for the United States’ fiscal future and already the effects are being felt as worldwide distrust of the once-mighty dollar is evident everywhere:
 
Item: George Soros, “The Man who Broke the Bank of England” a.k.a. the “International Man of Misery” who’s earned his tens of billions by wrecking currencies and whole economies especially in Europe and SE Asia  . . . is moving in for the kill. Soros -- the biggest individual funder of the Obama campaign for presidency via 54 separate U.S. and foreign foundations -- claims that the U.S. Dollar as evidenced by the S&P ratings adjustment is “no longer the world’s reserve currency.” Soros added that the dollar is plunging so quickly in value, central banks and investors have no choice but to shift away from the Greenback to avoid huge losses and that oil, gold and other commodities as well as currencies such as the Chinese Yuan, Euro and Yen are taking up the slack.
Item:  The price of gold has shot up to $1,503 the highest in history; silver moved up to $44.77 zeroing-in on its all-time high price of $51.28. Gold has risen 6.5% since the New Year; silver has climbed 55% in the same period.
Item: Numerous restaurants in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles have raised their prices and some have placed easily-read signs saying they take foreign currency such as the Mexican Peso, the French Franc, the British Pound and Canada’s dollar.
Item: The U.S. dollar index is currently near a 16-month low at roughly 74.30 against a basket of other currencies. The Federal Reserve banks’ easy-money policies are now coming under heavy criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans.
Item: Ethanol subsidizing continues although everyone who understands the problem realizes that Ethanol 1) is only viable because of government subsidies and cannot stand on its own and b)Ethanol causes far more pollution in sum than gasoline does because of the huge costs required to transport corn to the ethanol plants (not quite the same as an oil pipeline). Meanwhile the price of corn and corn products, which are found in about 300-different common foods, are sky-rocketing and surprise, so is the price of food.
Item: The price of oil, which seemed to be ebbing last week, has jumped back almost $5 to $110.60 a barrel. Gasoline prices above $4 per gallon are fast becoming commonplace.
Item: There may be a bit of a silver-lining to this last item. Whenever gasoline gets above $3.30 a gallon, Methanol becomes quite an attractive alternative as does Natural Gas. Both would require about a $150-200 retrofit to be used in cars, but they’re cheaper than gas now; much cleaner; much more abundant in the United States than anywhere else. Some environmentalists claim that while it’s better than gasoline, Natural Gas is still nasty pollution-wise.   At roughly$2.20 a gallon for gasoline we have a real cheap alternative – and of course sometime soon we could see gas prices double that in this country . . . keragen a.k.a. marlstone a.k.a. oil shale (it’s neither shale; nor oil and takes a mining rather than drilling operation to free from the ground. Right now the huge keragen deposits in Western Colorado, NE Utah; and Southwest Wyoming could provide 400 years worth of fuel for the entire world. The leader in that technology is TOSCO (“The Oil-Shale Co.”) and guess who our only real competitor for Keragen dominance might become? China. So you’d better believe it would be in our interests to develop keragen quickly before China does.
An Only Casually-Related Item: Even as 53% of Americans still blame our financial troubles on George W. Bush -- Goldman Sachs has just this week received a blistering new rain of criticism for making a fortune during the financial meltdown by short-selling many of those ridiculous lumped-together-mortgage packages based upon shoddy sub-prime home loans that banks and mortgage companies had been forced to make since President Carter first passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 (CRA ’77). CRA’ 77 law was expanded four times by President Clinton which Bush fought to repeal for 30 consecutive months between January, 2005 and July, 2007. Finally, a bi-partisan too-little, too-late bill passed which in August, 2010, Treasury Secretary Geithner paid respect to Bush for his efforts, by saying his law prevented a much worse meltdown and an utter collapse in home prices. Rajjpuut says, “Congratulations to Goldman Sachs! ”Isn’t it amazing how successful the left-wing is at blaming the free-markets and conservatives for every disaster caused by progressive left-wing interference in the free markets? 
After Clinton’s 1998 steroid-version expansion of CRA ’77 people without jobs; with horrific credit ratings; without rental histories; with only food stamps to declare as “income”; and even illegal aliens found it, easy thanks to ACORN, to get into $300,000 and $400,000 homes than people with good credit, etc. had faced in trying to get into $150,000 homes a decade earlier. If you’re uninformed and believe that conservatives pushed the economy into a ditch you deserve what Obama and the rest of the big spenders are giving us . . . the rest of us don’t. PS: who was the most famous ACORN attorney at getting home loan compliance forcing mortgage companies to make knowingly bad loans in Chicago?   Who was at the same time teaching night classes in self-described “Neo-Communist” Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”??? Barack Hussein Obama. In 1995 and 1996 Obama not only was successful in getting such outrageous loans repeatedly and getting promises of further compliance but also in securing large ACORN donations. Does all this make you proud to be an American?
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
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“It now seems that Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke here in America are the equivalent of a combined level 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster elsewhere.”
 
“The only reasons that anyone anywhere would buy or accept the Yen, Euro or Dollar right now is because they are either stupid or mad or have no choice (like retirees on Social Security). Get out! Get out! Get out! Put your retirement immediately into gold and silver . . . this government has not shown itself worthy of your trust. 
 
 
 
Credit Worthiness Doubts Plague the Once ALMIGHTY $$
Gold Prices Soar, S & P Makes Long Overdue
Negative Critique of U.S. Credit Rating
 
 
 
Gold prices moved to their highest in history in response to monetary shocks involving the Euro and the American Dollar. The incalculable damage done to America's once proud monetary system (for 60 odd years now, the Dollar has been the world's reserve currency) by the policies of Barack Obama and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke over the last twenty-seven months have just received their long-awaited first official comeuppance.   Standard & Poors has for the first time in history yesterday put a “negative” outlook rating upon the AAA credit rating of U.S. government Bonds. 
The American credit rating has never been anything but “stable” up till now. This long overdue move put American stock markets in a tailspin at least for Monday, 2011’s official Tax Day. Gold finished the day at $1493.00 per ounce while silver climbed to over $43.70 per ounce on the dramatic news.  In contrast, after being down over 250 points (1.9%) for most of the session the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended Monday off 140 points or down over 1.14%.   The announcement by S&P and the falling of the Euro combined for a bad day for financial markets in the West.
European nations are taking a belated but realistic look at the devastation that the insolvency of the P.H.I.G.I.E.S. countries (Portugal, Hungary, Ireland, GREECE, Italy, England and Spain; with England recently showing semi-drastic policy-change in support of their economy) where the specter of non-stop bailouts has created huge ripples in the world currency and stock markets. The debt crisis in Europe, despite the bailouts has seen the European community as a whole show evidence of some belt-tightening.  Here in America, however, Barack Obama has been spending and creating entitlements and big government like a maniac . . . and he’s been willfully abetted by the inflationary policies of Bernanke. 
The United States is one of just nineteen governments that enjoy S&P's highest, triple-A sovereign credit rating. It has had that rating, and a stable outlook, since 1941, when Standard Statistics merged with Poor's Publishing to form S&P.  S&P’s two predecessor agencies also gave the United States their highest ratings. S&P's warning came as a surprise, but only in the sense "that somebody decided to say the emperor has no clothes," says Howard Simons, a strategist with Bianco Research.
“If an agreement (on cutting deficit, national debt and UNfunded liabilities in the U.S.A.) is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin . . . this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns,” New York-based S&P said today in a report that maintained its top rating on U.S. long-term debt while lowering the outlook to “negative” for the first time. 
By comparison, S&P is widely rumored to be considering lowering the Japanese bond rating because of the effect of the three-pronged disaster that struck that Island recently. Up to now Japan has enjoyed an AAA rating with a “negative” outlook but been able to sell their bonds at lower interest rates because besides eschewing inflationary monetary policies, the Japanese are a long-reputed “nation of savers not debtors” and the internal demand for the nation’s bonds among its people is very high. It now seems that Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke here in America are equivalent to a combined level 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster** elsewhere.  Rajjpuut looks at some crucial wealth-protecting alternatives to normal investing in the footnotes including so-called “Forever Stamps.”
Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice it could lose its AAA credit rating unless policy makers agree on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt. “If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns,” New York-based S&P said in its report.
S&P said there’s a one-in-three chance that the rating might be cut within two years and that its “baseline assumption” is that Congress and the Obama administration will come to terms on a plan to reduce record deficits. Treasuries and the dollar rebounded from early losses following the statement, while stocks declined.  Another financial rating service, Moody’s Investor Service, which has a stable outlook on U.S. debt, today said the U.S. budget debate is “positive” for the country’s credit. The S&P  action puts pressure on Obama and House Republicans to come to agreement on plans to reduce the national debt, which S&P says could rise to 84 percent of gross domestic product by 2013 roughly a 25% increase from where it was when Obama took office in January, 2009.
In response, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called the S&P warning “a wake-up call for those in Washington asking Congress to blindly increase the debt limit.” S&P’s negative outlook “makes clear that the debt-limit increase proposed by the Obama administration must be accompanied by meaningful fiscal reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and stop our nation from digging itself further into debt,” the Virginia Republican said in a statement. Overseas investors hold about half of the roughly $9 trillion in outstanding marketable U.S. debt, including $1.2 trillion held by China and $ 0.9 trillion held by Japan. The specter of the Japanese government and China selling out American bonds and not renewing has many in Washington worried.
S&P failed to mention the $14.29 trillion debt ceiling, but said that if current American budget negotiations fail, it might not be possible to get an agreement until at least the 2014 budget cycle. Our Treasury Department has said the borrowing limit will be reached no later than May 16, at which point it will turn to emergency measures that provide borrowing room through about July 8. Republican leaders in Congress have said they will NOT back increasing the debt ceiling unless Obama agrees to more specific steps to trim the budget deficit, estimated to top $1.6 trillion this year, as well as agreeing to significant cuts. Nevertheless, despite all the attention the Dollar has recently received, the Euro is balancing on the edge of disaster and the Euro has risen in recent months compared to the Dollar. It seems that many worldwide investors are stuck in their ways considering only two currencies. Gold and silver, however, have seen meteoric rises in value compared to the Yen, Dollar and Euro.
Yes, there are other currencies more at risk. But the U.S. has, relative to its AAA peers, very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear according to the S&P report. The report also said that from 2003 to 2008, the U.S. total government deficit fluctuated between 2 and 5 percent of gross domestic product. "Already noticeably larger than that of most 'AAA' rated sovereigns, it ballooned to more than 11 percent (under Obama) in 2009 and has yet to recover."
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
**
      The reader surely noticed that worldwide investors have for the most part shown little imagination in lining up their investment options for the last decade. The only reasons that anyone anywhere would buy the Yen, Euro or Dollar right now is because they are either stupid or mad or have no choice (like retirees on Social Security). Get out! Get out! Get out! Put your retirement immediately into gold and silver (or into “Forever Stamps” ???)  . . . this government has not shown itself worthy of your trust.  
      Taking the tiniest step to purchasing old-fashioned hard money (gold and silver coinage) would have provided investors a boost of roughly 450% in the case of gold and 420% for silver in the last decade. WE ARE LIVING THROUGH INFLATIONARY TIMES . . . fiat, paper currency (paper money NOT backed by gold and silver) is at great risk. Of course, one can always buy bullion gold or silver . . . but the advantage especially of junk silver (90% silver U.S. coins minted before 1965) is that they come in a “package” people are used to dealing with. Robert Ringer (author of “Winning through <despite> Intimidation”) and Harry Browne (author of “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World) as early as 1973 were touting the opportunity in “junk silver” following the LBJ years.     
      After LBJ, Carter and now after Obama gets through with us . . . junk silver looks to be among the smartest investments possible. Shortly after the government began taking the silver content out of dimes, quarters and half dollars (55.5% in 1965 under LBJ; and the rest in 1971 by Nixon) the price of silver reached $1.65 per ounce, the break-even point. Silver is now at $43.87 per ounce. When it reaches $51.15 per ounce it will have earned its investors in 1965 3000% gain plus the original value. Let’s say two more things about silver . . . .
     Silver is heavy, so for those hoping to store great wealth:  alternatives like gold, platinum and palladium are much more desirable in the short run. Let Rajjpuut urge you, however, to keep a lot of silver handy. Why? Because . . . .
A.                           Silver is a very, very handy and very recognizable unit of exchange for emergency uses and even for everyday purchasing.
B.                           A strange thing has happened in industry. Gold and silver have always been necessary for manufacturing especially in electronics for both metals and up to recently in photography for silver. The fact is that because of silver’s relative cheapness, it has been the preferred metal in industry. Since when used industrially, a metal is seldom recovered . . . silver, at any given time is now RARER than gold in human hands. (It’s still easier to mine silver which is often found with gold in the earth and more common, but silver because of its cheapness is used so much more frequently in industry that the amount of silver held for wealth repository or for jewelry is less than the amount of gold. Rarity makes things valuable so in Rajjpuut’s twisted mind, silver is the better buy.
C.                            Historically the easily most common ratio of gold to silver value has been in the 15/1 – 16/1 range. So if gold is worth $1500 than IF the ratio was holding, silver would be selling at $100 per ounce about $150 higher than its present value. So again the balance of value now favors silver.
      Silver, alas, is heavy. Gold, platinum and palladium are so very valuable that making small purchases with them is not feasible . . . here’s another alternative:  so-called “Forever stamps.”   Background: when he was a boy, Rajjpuut lived in Germany and had a brief spell as a junior philatelist, a stamp collector. One of the most remarkable things he experienced was the beautiful mint Adolf Hitler stamps he collected with tiny values like 60 pfenning (then 15 cents American) compared to stamps issued during the German Weimar Republic with enormously high values like 200,000 Deutsch Marks many of which even had the original cost blacked out or just lined through and a higher value printed upon them.   The four Deutsch Marks to a Dollar before World War I eventually reached $26 TRillion DM to the buck by November, 1923, at the height of their severe inflation (about the time Adolf Hitler became a well-known national name by attempting the “Beer-Hall Putsch” in Munich <that is, attempting a coup d’ etat at pistol point upon the Bavarian State>). What’s that got to do with the price of tea? The U.S. Post Office “leadership” has decided they can save on printing costs and inconvenience for customers and themselves by printing “Forever Stamps.” The post offices hope to avoid constant rushes of huge customer lines for 1-cent, 3-cent, 5-cent stamps, etc. in their facilities when they start changing stamp prices more frequently due to rising## inflation. 
      The idea is that stamps printed without a price label and only the words “First Class” written upon them will be issued. Again: notice that NO price will be shown. So, if say, the price of a first-class stamp is now $.50 and the cost of first-class postage increases to say $5.00 per letter in four years, for example . . . even though postage has increased nine times to now cost ten times the original value, the postal customers’ old stamps still do the trick. In INFLATIONARY times that’s a huge boon for the customer savvy enough to have bought in bulk early on in the inflationary history. Stamps, of course, are light but need more protection from the elements especially water. For convenience sake the best way to buy in Rajjpuut’s not-so-humble opinion is in 100 stamp rolls which come in a protective seal.    So a 100-roll of stamps today costs, say $50.00 and will do the same trick as a 100-roll of stamps four years from now, but the hundred-roll of stamps at that time in the future costs $500.00. For those doing a lot of posting, the value of keeping ahead of postal rates is obvious. For the rest of us, stamps can be used as a very convenient form of MONEY.
Of course, collectible stamps and coins are also great storehouses of value, however, unlike everyday items like ordinary silver coins and ordinary postage stamps -- which both can be used easily AS MONEY – collectible items are “illiquid.”   “Liquid” means easy to dispose of. Dollar bills are highly liquid, but valuable stamps or coins are hard to get rid of without losing a lot of money, because stamp collectors and coin collectors interested in paying you what the item is truly worth are hard to find especially during financial crisis.  Pawnshop dealers might give you 35%. So, at most only 5% or 6% of your “portfolio” should be tied up in illiquid assets whatever they be, unless you are amazingly rich . . . in which case, you’d buy lots of valuables and hie thee to a safer haven where inflation is not a prospect. Rajjpuut hope this overview on protecting your wealth helps. He also hopes his 100% wrong about the need to take such extraordinary means. However, in his estimation, these are desperate times courtesy of BHO and call for desperate measures.
##
      Is there any advantage from Forever Stamps for the Post Office, you might ask?  Once purchased, a forever stamp is a perpetual stamp that never expires or declines in value. It's value, therefore, is the First-Class Mail stamp postage rate for a one ounce letter at the time of use (not the purchase-day cost) . . . so isn’t the post office risking bankruptcy? Perhaps not! First of all, the Post Office gets an immediate cash flow. Nobody buys those 100-stamp rolls and uses all 100 immediately . . . if they’re such a big operation and need 100 stamps or more per day, they get a special rate and print their postage labels right at their business. These Forever Stamps are aimed at the individual postal customer. So the post office saves on employees manning their front counter and has all this cash to use now when prices are what they are now, not what they’ll be in the future . . . with good management (oh-oh?!) they’ll stay well ahead of the curve and might show a string of profits for once. However, if the hyper-inflation -- that Bernanke and Obama seemed hell-bent on giving us -- comes about, that might be a different story.   People all over the country who’ve bought up dozens or hundreds of Forever Stamps using them like money in exchanges with tiny businesses who use even five to ten stamps daily could put a dramatic strain on the post office finances. Besides Rajjpuut might go into the “Forever Stamp” counterfeiting business . . . .
 
 

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“Soros, you see is making a great BLUFF and his multi-billions are now at risk . . . .”
 
 
 
Are Ben ‘n Barack Deliberately
Undermining Economy for Soros
 
 
            Multi-billionaire supposed philanthropist~~ George Soros has now stepped out into the open. The man with the self-acknowledged “God complex” has pulled off the kid gloves and is moving in for the kill. Declaring that the dollar as we’ve known it is dead, not in so many words – but yes, in fact, Soros claimed at a recent conference at Bretton-Woods, New Hampshire that the American Dollar was no longer the world’s reserve currency. The “Man who Broke the Bank of England” (1992) a.k.a “The International Man of Misery,” infamous for preparing and profiting from the destruction of numerous nations’ currencies -- Soros laughingly talked about the badly-weakened Dollar now sharing duty with the Euro, the Yen and several other currencies. For those in the know, that highly gross insult wasn’t lost upon us . . . .
 
Soros knows as do we that 1) in the wake of bailing out Greece, Ireland and Portugal and preparing to bail out Italy, Spain and possibly Hungary . . . the Euro is a horrifically threatened currency and also that  2) the Japanese Yen has been devastated by the monster earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor problems and thirty huge aftershocks (the latest this week measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale) . . . in short the Dollar (if indeed it’s only on a par with the Yen and Euro), as George suggests, is dead as a doornail. 
 
George didn’t have his billions back in the late 40’s when the British Pound Sterling gave up its two-century old position as the world’s reserve currency to the United States’ greenback, so he wasn’t able to profit from that terrific misery . . . but “Spooky Dude” definitely knows his history. Because of that, Soros said that efforts to attack the American DEBT were short-sighted and the only way for our economy to survive was to risk incurring a lot more debt to get the economy humming. He put it this way, “The big question is not whether the U.S. Dollar should be the world’s reserve currency. It no longer is. That role is shared with the Euro, Yen and other currencies and commodities such as gold, oil . . . .”
 
Acting as if he, King George, was the acknowledged leader of the entire world, Soros set up his economic conference on the site of the famous Bretton-Woods economic conference which charted the monetary future of the planet as the end of World War II approached. That first Bretton Woods agreement established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states in the mid-20th Century.  In planning the rebuilding of the international economic system as the European and Pacific Wars still raged, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton-Woods, N.H. and after proper deliberation signed the Bretton-Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944. Soros at his Bretton-Woods meetings has called for the renunciation of the American Dollar right here on American soil in a particularly grandiose and self-serving manner.
 
All that not being enough for Spooky George, he tried his hand at straightforward sabotage as well. In his prescription to rush the fall of the Buck once and for all, Soros pretended he was offering good economic advice designed to save the currency as he pooh-poohed calls for strengthening the dollar by dealing with the debt (such as Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan has made with his proposed 2012 budget) saying, “There is very a strong push to tighten the budget as a way to reduce government spending… In my opinion, the country could actually absorb some more debt in order to get the economy going. If you have a growing economy, you can tolerate a higher level of debt.” Soros, you see is making a great BLUFF and his multi-billions are now at risk . . . . 
 
That’s right, Soros who has twice before made a play to bring the United States’ fiscal house down around us was NOT counting on the fiscal-conservative backlash that has dominated the U.S. political scene since mid-2010 and sent so many progressive big-spending politicians’ (88% of them progressive Democrats) packing in the most recent elections.  As a result his “bets” against America are deeply at risk. He is heavily invested in futures positions based upon the collapse of our currency . . . thus preparing to once again repeat the successful currency forays that made him a multi-billionaire while helping wreck the economies of Britain (a second time), Russia, Malaysia, etc., etc. ad nauseum.   Next to the radical jihadist element of Islam, no one hates the United States nearly so much as George Soros does. He made his first big play to cut the country down to size, by pouring billions into the Kerry election campaign in 2004 and into anti-George W. Bush propaganda. Bush #2 was not our wisest president, no doubt . . . but he was patriotic enough and wise enough NOT to get under George Soros’s thumb (something that Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama cannot say) and wise enough NOT to consider printing money as a satisfactory answer to any sort of problem. Barack Obama, by comparison, is a George Soros puppet.
 
Speaking of “the great man who’s now along with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) already spent over $1.2 million to prevent efforts to find his birth certificate” -- less than a week ago President Obama became the first to throw his hat officially into the ring as a declared candidate for the presidency in 2012 . . . now he and his campaign are officially prepared to receive all the millions that Soros and his fifty progressive foundations can pour his way.   If the policies of Barack Obama have been seemingly impossible to understand, one has only to ask three questions to clear up the matter completely. A) What would the international communists and America’s labor leaders want him to do to undermine the United States?  B) What would George Soros prefer? And C) How can he best disguise his loyalties to Georgie S. and his Red Friends.  Usually the first two questions generate the same answer and Barack’s duty is clear. When there is conflict between the two positions, Obama is forced to think for himself and his trademark “dithering” becomes apparent as he seeks to chart Path C.
 
Whether or not Barack proves to be a one-term president will likely depend upon the economy and/or his ability to sell Americans on his contention that the economy belongs 100% to his predecessor – always has, always will.   With the liberal media on his side, it won’t necessarily be a hard sell.   Surprisingly, 34% of voters still give him good or excellent marks on running the economy although only 14% believe their taxes will go down due to Obama’s governing; only 30% now see their own financial picture as good or excellent; and 69% of American voters call themselves “at least somewhat angry” about the policies of the government. With the unending help of the media, Obama will likely be made a hero by the media for the passage of the 2011 budget with two more challenges ahead: the status of the national debt (he wants to raise the Debt Ceiling up well past $15 TRillion) and the 2012 budget drafted by Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan (which cuts $6.2 TRillion from the debt over the next decade; compared to Mr. Obama’s budget which increased spending 4% and ratchet up the deficits and debt as well.
 
Obama’s unwitting^^ partner in crime in making King George’s dreams come true is Ben Bernanke, Chief of the Federal Reserve Banking System. The stagnation the country has felt economically is now being compounded by Bernanke-created inflation. At present the ceaseless physical and electronic creation of money by Mr. Bernanke has made the 2011 U.S. dollar technically worth only 3.2 pennies worth if the late 2008 greenback. The treasury department has hidden our current inflation by A) insisting that food and fuel costs don’t count and B) by overweighting the cost of housing in the current inflation statistics.  Since we don’t buy houses everyday and since we do need food and fuel every day, in reality we are now paying 16% more for the everyday necessities than we did when George W. Bush was president. While the civilized world has been ostentatiously tightening its belt Bernanke, Barack, Soros & other Sons of B______ have been seriously counterfeiting the American Dollar. 
 
You need look no further than the Euro . . . this abysmally weak currency is now trading very strong about 1 4/9 as valuable as the Buck. All over the globe folks are noticing and buying gold, silver, oil, or other currencies with their dollars. Few are eager to embrace dollars unless they’re given bonus amounts. The debt and the inflation scare are two sides of the same coin with Barack, Ben and Soros the edge of that coin . . . trying to sell the world and Americans on the notion that stagflation is a great step on the road to repairing the American economy.   Surprisingly, George Soros might be even more over-extended than the American economy is. If his bluff doesn’t work and doesn’t help rush the American economy into absolute bankruptcy, King George might just find himself a mere hundred millionaire again, more’s the pity. 
 
Besides that potential problem: 1) George’s funding for ACORN has now proven a major liability 2) Soros, Gore, Obama, Raines, Rogers, Strong, both Clintons, several Goldman Sach’s bigwigs and at least 54 other top progressives already lost their shirts when their little cap and trade scheme backfired and they had to sell out their holdings in the CCX (Chicago Climate eXchange) after neither legislative bullying nor Obama-ordered EPA regulatory bullying proved sufficient to move the nation toward full carbon-trading. Instead of hundreds of billions of profits they wound up collectively losing millions. Al Gore just missed becoming the first “Green Billionaire” and Soros’ foundations suffered mightily. Bottom line, Barack Obama badly owes his puppet-master . . . do not expect him to cave in on the Ryan budget in any way, shape or form. Unlike the first ACORN president who delivered the Motor-Voter Act and four separate expansions** of CRA ’77 to ACORN in payment for their corrupt backing . . . the totally incompetent “Anointed One” Barack Obama has failed to deliver much of anything to his handlers. The Deficit-Ceiling votes and the Ryan Budget Package will undoubtedly be his last hurrah unless he finds unmitigated success . . . which the G.O.P. can hand him or deny.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
~~          Philanthropist is a euphemism used by progressives to describe King George Soros. Like all euphemisms, this is a LIE to hide truth that’s harsh, offensive or blunt.
According to Canada Free Press, “George Soros is a ‘philanthropist’ if by ‘philanthropist’ we mean one who creates chaos, destruction and financial ruin for his own personal gain, it’s a perfect fit.  Calling Soros a philanthropist is rather like referring to the Nazi block wardens as Neighborhood Watch.” They go on . . . .
“Soros certainly gives lots of money away.  But a philanthropist acts to improve the human condition.  Soros acts solely to improve the Soros condition.  Despite the lofty sounding rhetoric about an Open Society, Soros’ objective is to wreck the United States.  Actually Soros never really defines his Open Society.  The concept arose in the 1930s with the notion of a moral code based on “universal principles”.  After tweaking the concept to suit his own purposes, Soros adopted his own version of an Open Society which would be one in which the US has no power. 
“Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 to non-practicing Jewish parents.  His father, a lawyer was able to hide their identities and young George was recruited by the Nazi’s Judenrat to hand out flyers deceptively directing Jews to turn themselves in for deportation to the death camps.  Soros later said he found the work exhilarating.  Later passing himself as an official’s godson, he accompanied his benefactor confiscating valuables from innocent Jews.  Soros would later tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that he had ‘no remorse’ about what he had done.
“In fact, Soros doesn’t have remorse for much, if anything.  In The Shadow Party (David Horowitz and Richard Poe, 2006), Soros is quoted as saying that ‘conscience clouds an investor’s judgment.’”
Additionally, our philanthropist Mr. Soros has been accused several times of illegal currency manipulation and also was convicted in France of insider trading . . . certainly he has no compassion for the victims of his monetary shenanigans.
 
^^Bernanke is a self-mis-directed-would-be patriot who mistakenly believes he and only he correctly understands American economic history. Big Ben has written several scholarly papers on the Great Depression. He actually believes that by and large Hoover on the one hand and FDR and his administration on the other did a relatively good job and that a huge amount of the blame for the depth and duration of the Great Depression were caused by unenlightened Federal Reserve policies and too-tight monetary$$ policies. The Fed was undoubtedly at fault somewhat, but the anti-capitalistic actions of Hoover and FDR are the root cause. When he’s not allowed to read his own writing, Bernanke makes a lot more sense. Indeed, at times he sounds like he’s got his finger on the pulse of things when he says he favors
a)     “Reducing the U.S. budget deficit by reform of the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs”
b)      Accomplished by cutting spending, or entitlement payments or raising taxes or some combination of those three actions. 
He notably does not account for the debilitating effect of raising taxes on prosperity . . . .
$$ No one seems to know, much less take advantage of the great historical lesson known as the “Invisible Depression” wherein Woodrow Wilson’s (much more acute recession than the 1929 market crash brought about) severe recession was tamed in fifteen months by President Warren G. Harding’s combination of cutting spending by 49%; cutting taxes by 48% and paying down the debt 30%. FDR, while calling Hoover “a socialist” promised to repeat the Harding formula, but, of course, did exactly the opposite and extended the depression into a 12.5 year Great Depression.
 
** CRA ’77 was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 passed by Jimmy Carter and progressive politicians (about 86% of them Democrats). This was the greatest government interference in the free market ever conceived. Banks and mortgage companies were required to knowingly make abysmally bad loans to unqualified would-be home owners. In 1976, 0.24% of home loans were considered ‘suspect.’ Thanks to ACORN (then the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now) working almost totally in Arkansas under Governor Bill Clinton, that rate for the entire nation doubled to 0.51% suspect loans by 1986. When Clinton took office in 1993 he repaid ACORN (become the Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now) with the Motor-Voter Act and a huge regulatory expansion of CRA ’77 almost immediately. In 1995 he twice legislatively expanded CRA ’77. By 1996, 14.08% of all home loans in the country were suspect. In 1998, Clinton passed the steroid-version expansion of CRA legislation. By 2000, the housing bubble was underway and the sub-prime lending crisis was a fact of life by 2005 when 34% of all home loans were suspect . . . but the situation was much worse than the numbers showed: instead of a tiny amount of loans at 3% down payment for $80,000 and $120,000 homes we had a huge amount of 0% loans on homes in the $320,000 to $480,000 range. Instead of “iffy” loans to former military officers attending college on the GI Bill (0.24% in 1976); we now had horrifically bad loans at 0% to people without jobs; with horrible credit ratings; without even rental histories; whose only “income” was food stamps; and even to illegal aliens. If you’re confused by all this and why the word “deliberately” was deliberately used in the headline to his blog: here’s some information on the progressives’ Cloward-Piven Strategy published in 1966, which deliberately bankrupted New York City in 1975 requiring a federal bailout . . . .
 
 
 
 
 

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“You can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived foolish notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests.” Rajjpuut
 
"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." - Adolf Hitler
 
"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the “invisible hand” which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." John Maynard Keynes (nearing his death) in 1946
 
 
Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama
Inflating Our Dollars in Hopes
of Avoiding Double-Dip Recession
 
          It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public.   All parties, though they may not yet realize it, are faced with the disaster of being the last one holding more and more worth less and eventually worthless American dollars. Let’s examine the battlefield they’re contesting upon.  
The history is brief but poignant: the oldest continuing currency in the world is the British Pound Sterling (BPS) first minted in 775 A.D when "sterlings" or silver pennies were the main currency; 240 sterlings or “pence” weighed one pound.  Silver is relatively heavy so you can imagine how small these sterlings were:  just 1/15 of an ounce each. Their earliest common use was to bribe the Viking invaders  with so-called danegeld and that money became the currency of many 
Scandanavian nations as well as England.  
For over two hundred years between the early 18th and middle 20th Centuries, the BPS was esteemed as the world’s reserve currency (a currency from one country held in substantial quantities by a significant amount of the world’s other nations whose leaders believe this “hoarding” of the originating country's currency as a “reserve” was in the best interests of their countries and the  leaders themselves). 
Before World War I the BPS was clearly and easily the most important international currency with London the world's most important financial hub.  Over 60% of global trade was financed, invoiced and settled in sterling, and the largest proportion of official reserves owned by the world’s nations, apart from silver and gold, was found in BPS notes. Although not even all the territories within the British Empire itself used the BPS as their local currency, most of those that did NOT, pegged their local currency at a fixed rate to sterling, as did many foreign countries outside the Empire including virtually every advanced and important country in the world.   But this two-century old revered status for the BPS was soon to end . . . .
After World War I, the two greatest economies of the planet (America and Britain) had long based their economic thoughts and actions on the hero of the Scottish Enlightenment Adam Smith, author of  . . . the Wealth of Nations (1776) a long-titled book that profoundly motivated our American Founding Fathers when they started drawing up a Constitution eleven years later. Smith who had referred to the idea of “the invisible hand” in his books History of Astronomy and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eventually found his real niche and talked about “the invisible hand” of the marketplace; and laissez-faire capitalism as the foundation of sound economics.  And England and America as a result of common sense and listening to Adam Smith found themselves prospering mightily. Smiths' fundamental tenet was this:   free market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies and both England and America largely practiced what Smith preached and prospered mightily over the next century and a half.  But something new was very rotten in England . . . .
England’s own John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most trusted economists and Keynes believed that gold and silver and currencies pegged to precious metals were holding back economic growth around the world. Keynes’s  two-volume economic idiocy* Treatise on Money, was published in 1930** and Britain left the gold standard in 1931^^, and many foolish countries that had pegged their currencies to gold and kept reserves in the BPS went along with the nonsense, most especially those countries within the British Commonwealth of Nations.  These countries and others around the world became known as the "sterling bloc".
After World War II ended, the ungrateful British citizens ousted Winston Churchill and welcomed in the progressives (the Labor Party) who began to immediately and seriously inflate the British Pound.  In response most countries outside the Commonwealth quickly began jettisoning the pound in droves. The world faced economic chaos. The natural action of the wise countries was to put their reserves in gold or silver; but they also wanted a more flexible currency as part of their reserves. Since that time, the American Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency and has dominated the international scene for over sixty years.
However, all has not been peachy keen for dollar holders . . . .
1) Richard Nixon in the midst of a pervasive and lengthy American stock market crash (it ran from 1969 with a brief hiatus in ’70-’71 to become a full-fledged meltdown in 1973-74) sabotaged many of them when he let the dollar float against gold.  Nixon's and his second vice- president Gerald Ford's and especially the actions of President Jimmy Carter (inflation briefly reached 21% near the end of his single-term presidency) caused much consternation among dollar-holders.
2) About late 1998, many worldwide holders of the dollars again began to feel serious misgivings about the effect of sub-prime home lending policies festering in America and began ridding themselves of dollars. In the decade between 1999 and 2009, many began putting their reserves into other currencies (most notably the Euro). The peak dollar holdings in 1999 at 70.9% plunged to 62.2% in 2009; while the Euro became the 2nd favorite reserve currency going from 17.9% to 27.3% holdings. Since mid-2009, serious discussions have been taking place about replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has made a recommendation to that effect while countries like China and Russia and Brazil and India are exploring conducting trade among themselves in their native currencies (Yuan, Ruble, Real and Rupee), while buying gold and silver and lowering their dollar holdings.
Dollar holders face another serious threat in the Obama era.  Neither the IMF nor the many foreigners and foreign nations holding American Dollars already . . . and especially not those foreign governments most-willing in the past to loan money to Americans (by buying our Treasury Notes and other debt instruments)  . . . are enthused by the deliberate and egregious inflationary actions of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
C) Bernanke has been running the money printing presses full-time for over thirty months right now.  Currently, if mathematics alone (and not pure trust and tradition) were the telling factor in how much the 2011 American dollar should be worth, it would weigh in   about 1/30 of the value of the October, 2008 American Dollar.
D. In February, 2011, President Barack Obama’s feeble attempt at a national budget showed willful refusal to deal with  our nation's and the world's "dollar problem."  Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the vast majority of Democrats and Union leaders and Michael Moore go so far as to deny any debt crisis exists.   It seems you can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests.  Obama and the progressive are now threatening even greater American deficits and national debt. This shows the world that unless the Republican House of Representatives can change the nation’s direction . . . loaning America money and holding American dollars is one of the stupidest actions anyone can make. This brings us back to paragraph one above, where we (presuming that the Republican efforts to eliminate the debt and balance the budget fall short of success) said:
It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public.   Who will be the sucker left holding the American Dollar?
            Unless the G.O.P. can work a miracle . . .  who will be the biggest fool of all still holding onto American dollars rather than using them as toilet paper by 2013?  One world famous economic theorist once said, “"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." On the theory that you can’t go too far wrong doing precisely the opposite of whatever Adolf Hitler would recommend, a lot of the “contestants” will undoubtedly opt-out of the contest and buy gold and silver. Another man finally wised up at the very end . . . "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago," said John Maynard Keynes nearing his death in 1946 just before the BPS lost its place as the world’s reserve currency.
            Isn’t it funny how the wisest words spoken by some of the world’s most influential progressives are totally ignored? FDR and labor leader George Meany and Jimmy Carter, for example, all agreed that allowing labor unions among government employees is a horrible idea. The founder of Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes himself, admitted that Adam Smith had been right and he’d been mistaken . . . but the progressives remember only their nonsense and, indeed, come to worship it.   In all this talk about “millions” as “chump change” and “billions” as “insignificant,” let’s examine what they really mean. Politicians love the public’s inability to deal with large amounts of money, since it frees them to do just about whatever they please . . . think of this: we are currently $14.1 TRillion in debt so paying off the debt at $1 per second means that . . .
1 million seconds = approximately 12 days to pay off $1 million
1 billion seconds = 32 years to pay off $1 Billion
1 trillion seconds = 32,000 years to pay off $1 Trillion
14.1 trillion seconds = 451,000 years to pay off $14.1 TRillion
             Now let’s get back to that game of Hot Potato. Rajjpuut encourages you NOT to be the last one holding dollars in serious quantities when inflation rears its ugly head. Good luck!
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
^^ Influenced also by Keynes, FDR confiscated all non-numismatic American gold in 1933 giving the holders of the coins $20.76 per ounce of gold. He then pegged the value of gold at $35.00 an ounce thus within months inflating American paper currency by 68.6% and robbing the people, to enrich the federal government – a move that turned the depression with a little ‘d’ into the 12.5 year long Great Depression.   Compare the dealings of progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR to Harding (and his vice president Calvin Coolidge who succeeded Harding when he died in office) in dealing with the “Invisible Depression,”(see the next footnote) should you ever get confused about what’s best for the people and how the purported best-interests of the nation almost always amount to out-and-out theft from hard-working and thrifty individuals.
** Keynes’ “thinking” in 1930 deliberately ignored the fact that the American resurgence (“The Roaring 20’s”) from the “Invisible Depression of 1920” came almost immediately on the heels of the policies of President Warren G. Harding who cut government spending by 48%; cut federal taxes by 49% and paid down the national debt by 30% ending Woodrow Wilson's depression in fifteen months.  Perhaps Keynes believed that the progressive policies of Wilson that created the debacle were responsible for the greatest single-decade jump in prosperity the world has ever known? In any case like many English Fabian-Socialists, Keynes embraced and encouraged progressivism. His ideas fitting right in with the demands of totalitarian states and wannabes everywhere have been thunderously applauded for 80 years but never once worked satisfactorily . . . hmmmm.
 
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by: Trent Derr - Morning in America

 

As I mentioned to some friends, due to the amount of money the President is borrowing from the Chinese, Obama is no longer able to refer to the Chinese leader as Hu Jintao. Now Obama is required to call him Hu JaDaddy.  To paraphrase Jay Leno, the bad news is the Chinese Leader came to the White House this week.  The good news is he said we could keep it.

 

However I’m not picking on the Chinese.  I’m opposed to the United States owing that amount of money to anyone.  Let alone a country that crushes dissent in their citizens, imprisons their Noble Prize winners, thinks that America is a temporary aberration in history, and has nuclear weapons pointed at us.    In any debtor relationship, you lose authority and the ability to negotiate from a level playing field.  Anyone who doesn’t think it matters where you borrow money is a fool.   Just ask a person who has ended up in “cement shoes” in the waters off of New Jersey whether it matters. But I digress…

 

Personally, I’m not as concerned about what our debt to China says about them as what is says about us.  The reckless increased spending by the Obama Administration is not primarily being driven by building infrastructure, fighting a war, or funding social security.  Continue...
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Saving Your Butt as Monetary System Collapses
        
       
 
 
 

            Hopefully, the politicians will regain their senses in the next couple or three months and the survival information in this little blog will never have to be used . . . call the odds on that happening 200/1 since the tax and spend Democrats still control the senate and Barack Obama still wields the veto pen in the Oval Office. The last time an American President showed courage and wisdom in the face of a severe monetary crisis was 1921 (Harding slashed government spending 48%; taxes 49%; and paid down the National Debt 30% in turning the depression left him by Woodrow Wilson into the "Invisible Depression" within fifteen months).  Unfortunately,Barack Obama won't join with the Republicans to save your butt; indeed he's still suggesting mad policies (in the State of the Union speech) that guarantee the grand-daddy of all fiscal meltdowns.  Either kiss your butt goodbye, or take matters into your own hands because your survival in the coming meltdown depends upon you.

Rajjpuut began advising readers in early 2004 of the dangers represented by the sub-prime lending crisis to our economy and to their wealth. You know how that turned out . . . . Since roughly April, 2009, he’s been warning of a complete fiscal meltdown in America associated with the U.S. Dollar’s collapse (when the greenback is no longer accepted as the World’s Reserve Currency) and hyper-inflation attacks our way of life . . . since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been busy at the money printing presses and electronically creating dollars as well, the 2011 dollar is technically worth 3.4 pennies of a late 2008 greenback.  Our National Debt stands at 95% of our GDP even though Ben Bernanke put the figure at 64% in a National Press Club speech three days ago (he did not include the $4.6 TRillion we've stolen from Social Security and Medicare "lockboxes" which moves the debt from $9.5 TRillion to $14.1 TRillion).  Our UNfunded liabilities stand at $113 TRillion.  We will soon be able to tax every citizen 100% on their earnings and not be able to fund the profligate Obama budget.  The nations of the world individually and the leaders of the world's monetary foundations are in agreement the American Dollar as the world's reserve currency is no longer acceptable; the system stands on the verge of disintegration and you are innocently sitting on the couch watching "reality TV" and playing video games?

To fight against this growing present threat, even more than gold, Rajjpuut has been advising readers to consider buying so-called “junk silver.” Junk silver needs a new name because purchase of a $100-face value bag of American silver coins (pre-1965 dimes, quarters, half-dollars with 90% silver content) now costs -- depending on the price of silver on a given day -- between $1,850 and $1,950 dollars. Few people realize that as an investment, silver has outperformed gold in the 21st Century. Yes, yes, gold has risen roughly 300% (quadrupled in value since the original 100% is added in) but silver has risen 521% over the same period or gone up to 621% of its original value.

One other little thing: people don’t realize is that silver is now more rare than gold. While virtually every ounce of gold that’s ever been mined is still with us today; approximately 96% of all the silver that’s ever been mined is believed lost forever. Silver has a huge present day demand and  has long dominated the industrial markets: it’s still used in photography; and is the preferred metal for electronics, pollution control, tableware and utensils; chemical catalysis; medical use; and in some countries it’s still used in coins . . . but let’s get back to the junk silver we were talking about, when silver reaches $33 per ounce, each silver dime will be worth $2.00. If hyper- inflation hits silver will be in far greater demand than that, for the price of a single silver dime, it’s likely that you’ll be able to buy enough to feed a person three-squares as merchants desperate to trade their wares for something of intrinsic/real value look to silver as their own best investment. These same merchants might NOT accept $4,000 paper dollars for the same food under the same circumstances.

Does that sound far-fetched?   At the end of the Weimar Republic’s savage hyper-inflation, German citizens in late 1923 insisted upon being paid three times daily and having splurge-breaks to run off and buy anything just so their money wouldn’t lose all its value before they could spend it. Eric Maria Remarque, famous author of All Quiet on the Western Front, displayed these facts quite graphically in his stark novel The Black Obelisk as 26 TRillion Deutsch Marks traded for one American dollar. Rajjpuut’s stamp collection contains Weimar Republic German stamps with printed prices cancelled out and new prices overprinted . . . in short, hyper-inflation is a mess you’d prefer not to deal with, but one it’s best to prepare for . . . .

However, while silver coins are a great idea, there is one truly great investment that trumps virtually everything else imaginable: farmland. Yes, real hold-in-your-hand coins are absolutely necessary, but the best investment of all over the last 40 years has been American farmland which easily outpaced bonds; stocks; gold and even silver. Farmland was about twelve times more lucrative than the Standard and Poors stock index; and more than four times better than gold during those 40 years. 

While the land appreciates in value, it can also be rented out or farmed by you in case of the utter end of civilization, and NO, farmland did not fall in price during even one quarter during our recent meltdown. Investments in the stock market in 1970 (adjusted for inflation) returned only 16% and the stock market can’t save your family in a serious crisis. Just as physical silver is a great idea, owning a farmable plot of land has its great attractions as well. If that’s impossible, you can invest in private Argentine farmland for about $7 an acre; the well-respected Stansberry Report even suggests buying Argentine farm property management via NASDAQ whenever such stocks sell for below book value. To get the full (it's a long presentation) picture, visit:

http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pro/1011PSISBBVD/EPSIM218/PRo=267094&s=269843&u=49822167&l=215636&r=Milo

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've at any time had SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration.  We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war.
Bernanke Sobers Up, Comes Clean, Sort of
 
            Ben Bernanke had a National Press Club audience laughing while doling out some super-serious information yesterday. For example, he reminded them that the country’s projected deficit and debt level are actually not only unsustainable but impossible . . . because the nation’s creditors at some point in the future would wise up and refuse to continue financing our country’s spending.
            ALERT:   Before going further with the blog itself . . . the nation’s latest jobless numbers came out earlier today: 9.0% unemployment sounds like an improvement over the recent 9.4%  . . . unfortunately, the fact is that virtually all of the “drop” in unemployment can be traced to unemployed persons who have stopped reporting in to the nation’s Workforce Centers and therefore “fell off” the statistical data base. True unemployment now stands at just a tad below 20% if all the unemployed; and  forcible part-time workers are included . . . not to mention all the grossly under-employed who lost better jobs and are working at stop-gap situations.  Only 36,000 jobs were created last month, almost 110,000 short of the projected 145,000.  1.4 million people gave up looking for jobs through official channels last month:  1.4 million!  We now have FEWER JOBS in AMERICA than we've seen at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration. The situation is getting so hopeless that more than half of the unemployed are no longer using the official Workforce procedures . . . these fictitious unemployment numbers just prove that when it comes to statistics, garbage in = garbage out. Now let’s get back to Ben Bernanke . . . . 
            “By definition, the unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debt (outlined by the Congressional Budget Office, CBO) cannot actually happen because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government whose debt . . . is rising without limit.” Currently the National Debt is stated at about 60% of the economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) officially; but in reality the figure is much closer to 95% than 60%. More on this soon . . . Bernanke said that the 90% threshold is projected by 2020 and debt would be 150% of GDP by 2030. But Bernanke’s citing of $9.5 trillion in national debt was sinfully inaccurate because it omitted the $4.6 trillion owed by the government to trust funds for things such as Social Security and Medicare, which have paid out cash to the Treasury in exchange for promissory notes. The full national debt – when both forms of debt are included is roughly $14.6 trillion.   
Mr. Bernanke also failed to acknowledge the 180-ton blue whale splashing about in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the fact that not including all our welfare programs and barring deliberately infecting all our nation’s elders simultaneous with ebola . . . the federal government is already obligated for roughly $113 TRillion in services via Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid. He also was less than forthcoming about the fact that Obamacare is now shifting a huge burden in Medicaid from the Feds onto the unwilling states which will presumably bankrupt every single state by 2026 (2023 in some less optimistic projections). To emphasize the point he was semi-obscuring, Bernanke quoted economist Herbert Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop” to exceedingly nervous Press Club laughter.
The Fed chairman strongly admonished Congress to act soon to cut spending or increase revenues (taxes), or some mix of the two,  because otherwise the U.S. economy will suffer a severe correction. “One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget must occur at some point,” he said. Bernanke avoided predicting when the U.S. might experience a debt crisis similar to what Greece and other European countries have experienced. Bernanke suggested lawmakers should forget politics and not use the debt and debt ceiling as “bargaining chips” or resort to playing political “chicken.” He also seemingly assured Republicans that their understanding was correct,   “Under current law, if the debt limit is not extended, for a time, the Treasury has various resources that it can use to make payments on our national debt,” he said, “but beyond a certain point, (our federal government) would not have those resources and the United States could conceivably — I think this is very remote, but it’s not something you want to play around with — the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt,” he said. “And the implications of that for our financial system, for our fiscal policy, for our economy would be catastrophic.”
The twin drivers of this unsustainable national path toward debt (and he did not mention, but also toward UNfunded liabilities), according to Bernanke is the double barrel impact of rising health care costs and exploding baby boomer retirements on entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. “Our ability to control health care costs, while still providing high-quality care to those who need it, will be critical for bringing the federal budget onto a more sustainable path.”   He tempered pessimism with a slightly optimistic look at the overall economy citing “increased evidence that a self-sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold,” but immediately slipped back into pessimism saying the economy “does look to be growing more quickly, but is still in a deep hole, is still very far from where we’d like it to be.”
Coupled with Bernanke’s speech the Senate Budget Committee heard from numerous “experts” about the most serious threats facing the hoped for economic recovery: the housing crisis; state, local and federal budget shortfalls; unrest in Egypt and its possible effects on shipping via the Suez Canal and on the price of oil; and the continuing European debt crisis. Home prices are expected to fall another 5% this year and 14-17 million Americans are currently “underwater” on their homes (owing more than their homes are worth now, not to mention after a further 5% drop in prices). Overall this amounts to an expected total average home price drop of 35% between 2007 and the end of this year possibly igniting another round of the vicious cycle of default, foreclosure and greater downward pressure on home prices.
The pressure is not all at the federal level either.   Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governor’s Association said that the Obamacare mandated explosion in Medicaid enrollment (coupled with other demands on the states shifted from the federal government) was the “700 pound gorilla” in the room as it increased costs to the states by 190 million by 2019. If the recession (which has been officially “ended” for over nineteen months now . . . you and I know better, any time home prices are down over 1/3 of their value in four years: that’s a recession!) continues, Rajjpuut concludes that the Obamacare-created meltdown of the states will happen sooner (2023) rather than later (2026). As far as bailouts, several of the witnesses at the senate hearing implied that there was no appetite for state bailouts.   Going back to Bernanke, he failed to mention that the Federal Reserve Banks under his command had been busy printing paper money and creating electronic money for the better part of twenty-seven months and there was, believe it or not, some obscure chance that the nation’s major creditors (such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, Japan and others) might not only notice but also object to his willful policy of inflation. Since technically the math says that the current dollar is worth 3.4 pennies worth of the late 2008 dollar . . . this could also be a problem, eh?
In short, Mr. Bernanke seems to be sobering up, but he’s still not admitting his drunken money-creation, so overall the prognosis for the patient is very, very, bad.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
PS remember this:  We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've known at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration.  We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war.  At a projected cost of 2 - 3.5 real jobs lost in the real economy for every government job created, is it any wonder?
Here's a chart of the eleven recessions the country's suffered through since World War II.   Notice the "V" shape typical of recession recovery is not present now thanks to government interference . . . .
 
chart-of-the-day-scariest-jobs-ever-feb-2011.jpeg 


 
 
 
 
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State of Union Speech Shows Obama

Seeking Utter Dominance of AWI

 

 

 

            In the good old days, the so-called “Misery Index” (MI) was achieved by adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. Notable, for example, was President Jimmy Carter inheriting Gerald Ford’s 13.45  misery index and then handing off a staggering 20.76 misery index to Reagan.   The term “stagflation” was invented to describe the particular type of mess that Carter had generated with his big government policies. Reagan in turn handed off a relatively low 9.57 misery index to his former Vice President G.H.W. Bush.  By the way, the only reason Carter got off so well is that the Democrats were keeping the stats and didn’t admit that inflation was 19% when he left office.

 

            Rajjpuut would like to submit for contemplation, however, the far more sensitive and indicative AWI or “Absolute Wretchedness Index” created by adding the weekly interest on the REAL NATIONAL DEBT (RND) to the Misery Index. Currently the nation’s REAL NATIONAL DEBT based upon a National Debt of $14.1 TRillion and UNfunded liabilities (just in Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid) amounting to $114.6 TRillion equals a grand total of . . . (Drum-roll, Maestro please . . . ) $128.7 TRillion. Welfare costs are another huge UNfunded outlay which the nation is obligated to cover, but the math gets too complicated so let’s stick with a current RND of $128.7 TRillion. That means the weekly interest on a Real National Debt would amount to $ 73 Billion or about $250 per week per American man, woman or child . . . not the debt itself, just the interest we pay on it . . . so with 9.5% unemployment and .4% inflation and $73 Billion weekly RND interest rates Mr. Obama’s current Absolute Wretchedness Index stands at 82.9 easily the worst in history. His predecessor George W. Bush’s highest AWI reading was 72.6. The closest thing we see to Obama’s 82.9 AWI is Carter’s at roughly 76.6.

 

            For those who decry any measurement system which disparages the noble contributions of that stalwart statesman Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps a little deeper study is required. While we appreciate that it’s just not cool to talk about esoteric subjects like having revenues meet obligations, according to information found in a book recently written by a former Comptroller General of the United States (Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility by David M. Walker) at the time he wrote his book the National Debt was about 5.5 times our income (the revenues of the nation). So considering our UNfunded liabilities as well as the debt, our obligations are now more than fifty times our revenues. We have thus severely mortgaged the country’s future and our children’s, grandchildren’s and great grandchildren’s future all the while facing a markedly different world in which America no longer has a virtual monopoly on desired goods and services and technologies but every year faces more and more serious competition in the global marketplace. Current taxes are one thing, but if we don’t start reducing our debt and the interest on the debt, then deferred taxes will destroy the nation. Let’s be clear on this: future taxes could triple and we’d still have trouble paying off both the interest on the National Debt and our future now UNfunded liabilities. That is, unless we do something NOW, everyone in the future would be taxed 100% of earnings and we still could not pay off either debt interest or obligations . . . and, of course we would have zero dollars for Defense or any other budget item . . . and still would not be dealing with the debt itself (again, just the interest).

 

            How far in the future are we talking about? Within 12 or 13 years the interest on the National Debt will be the single largest item in the nation’s budget unless current trends change dramatically. And you get absolutely nothing in return for it, all this interest we pay . . . hence we’ve named this measure of problematical agony: the Absolute Wretchedness Index or AWI.   50% of this money is owed to foreign governments with China being #1 and Japan #2 in holding our debt; a bloc of oil producing nations combined hold’s the #3 amount.  This is a crucial factor. Why did we back Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with $5 TRillion? Because foreign debtors demanded it, since they held so much of these U.S. debt instruments.

 

            The problem has two components, but despite all our current “pain,” only one of them matters. In the short term due to the economy, our two wars, and unemployment things are going to be painful . . . but this is a small drop in a huge ocean. The main component is the long-term structural imbalance. The budget and the deficits and the debt and the interest payments on the debt which are NOT sustainable.  Once the economy recovers we get out of the wars and finally see 5% unemployment again . . . things will be even worse because we’ll have continued on several more years increasing the debt; the interest on that new higher debt; and all our UNfunded liabilities as well. Huge unending deficits, year after year, as far as the eye can see will still loom ahead of us. It is this structural imbalance that threatens to destroy the country . . . hence our headline “State of Union Speech Shows Obama Seeking Utter Dominance of AWI.”

 

            Mr. Obama has, in real terms not in CBO configurations, increased the federal budget 41% if Obamacare and his other initivatives are considered. Now he talks about freezing discretionary federal spending at this super-elevated level for three years. What utter nonsense that pretense of his amounts to. We must begin to slash spending immediately towards 2006 or even 2004 levels. If we don’t we will lose the confidence of foreign lenders and find ourselves floating down the proverbial open sewer lacking a paddle or other means of locomotion other than our own hands as the dollar drops precipitously, interest rates and inflation soar, and our mild recession becomes a real depression and we see truly scary unemployment. Walker in his book called Washington “a lagging indicator” meaning that the politicians in their ivory towers and the political class who adore them aren’t getting the picture nearly as rapidly or as clearly as the people now do.

 

            It is the people, the voters, who are demanding something be done about these problems even if the solution is arduous and unpopular among politicians and their allies with a vested interest in the current unstainable structure. The current Obama administration and the Democratic majorities they had in Congress have called the TEA Party movement “astroturf” rather than a true grassroots movement; accused them of being merely a more rightwing version of the Republican Party; and shown them no respect at all.   Many of the current Republicans, such as John McCain’s daughter, lightweight pundit and columnist for The Daily Beast Meghan McCain, are proving just as blind about the TEA (Taxed Enough Already or Taken Enough Abuse?) Party as the Democrats. Ms. McCain objected to the TEA Party’s Michelle Bachmann commenting on Obama’s State of the Union address in addition to the Republican response so ably handled by Rep. Paul Ryan, saying, Bachmann was “at best a poor man’s Sarah Palin.”

 

            Ms. McCain, whose only accomplishment in life is being the daughter of a famous man, ought to show a little respect when she’s talking about her elders and about a woman of true accomplishment. As Walker’s book points out, the people are aroused now and Ms. Bachmann, Sen. Paul and Sen. DeMint recognize it even if she can’t.

 

            Let’s give you a real blast from the past when Time Magazine which loved Jimmy Carter finally had to admit things were none too rosy in their March 24, 1980 edition . . . .

 

                  "As Jimmy Carter stepped before the television cameras in the East Room        of the White House last Friday, his task was not just to proclaim another new anti-inflation program but to calm a national alarm that had begun to border on panic. Inflation and interest rates, both topping 18%, are so far beyond anything that Americans have experienced in peacetime—and so far beyond anything that U.S. financial markets are set up to handle—as to inspire a contagion of fear. Usually confident businessmen and bankers have begun talking of Latin American-style hyperinflation, financial collapse, major bankruptcies, a drastic drop in the American standard of living."

 

            We’ve heard plenty of talk about Obama’s and Bernanke sooner or later handing us a hyper-inflation and moving America toward Banana Republic Status so it appears history if it’s not repeating itself is at least humming the same rhyming song. Knowing that lesson in absolutely wretched history, let us pray not repeat it. Instead let us be pro-active in the Reagan sense and severely constraining the parasitic government, let us unleash the free market by cutting debt**; cutting spending; cutting taxes; cutting regulation; and ultimately under-cutting unemployment.

 

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

 

 

** actually Reagan’s negative legacy is the mountain of debt he handed us because dominated by Democratic congresses the welfare state continued to expand even during his eight years.

 
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A Sad End to the American Era??

 

 

            Greatly accelerated by the policies of Barack Obama and his progressive supporters, the bankruptcy of the United States is now a fact of lifeThe only questions left are A.  how and when the masses will become aware of it and B.  Will there be an honorable rebound or complete chaos as a result. Rajjpuut has long been warning about the ills of big government, unconstrained spending and of the deliberate betrayal of the country by the progressive-wing of the Democratic Party. 

 

            When the American Dollar loses the position it’s held for the last sixty years as the world’s reserve currency; virtually immediately a shift toward large-scale inflation will be incurred. How will you know that the curtain’s coming down on the American Greenback? Here are seven likely warning signs marking the end of the global U.S. Dollar standard (for most Americans that would mark the figurative “end of the world”) based upon historical antecedents in other countries which have seen their own currencies destroyed:

 

Warning Indicator #1: the price of gold will begin to accelerate toward it’s natural balance level of $12,000 per ounce. 

 

Since the price of gold has already risen over ten consecutive years some say gold has already achieved the acceleration required to prove the point. Others might be suspicious, “If it’s risen that much, isn’t it time that gold started to drop, no investment always goes up.” True, true, but when a currency is being deliberately devalued by its government, gold and silver always get much more valuable compared to that country’s money; and make no mistake, the United States has been deliberately devaluing the Dollar for roughly the last 28 months; and incidentally devaluing it for roughly the last 45 years. Normally markets and the price of commodities fluctuate all over the place as time passes. But the steady rise of gold (the world’s preferred money) as it is priced in dollars over such an extended time period shows that the dollar is not being taken seriously by knowledgeable people. 

 

Warning Indicator #2: Government’s deficits and liabilities are out of control and the interest on the national debt becomes a major source of deficit increase. 

 

Because the deficits of the United States government are right now well over $1.3 TRillion annually; our national debt has doubled since 2005; our total national debt is over $14 TRillion; and UNfunded liabilities without counting items like welfare and food stamps have now reached $112 TRillion . . . it’s a safe bet that this benchmark has been passed. By the way, even the numbers we’re fed are absolutely false. Did you know that the government counts all $850 billion of payroll taxes (Medicare and Social Security) as current income when we all know that the money in question is supposed to be a “set aside” marked for its intended use only rather than included as “general revenue.”  If you or I or any business carried on their accounting this way, jail-time would be in the offing, but our government has been handling things this way as far as the Social Security "set-aside lockbox" for nearly 80 years.  That's why UNfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid amount to $112 TRillion, twice the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the entire world.

Warning indicator #3: Spending gets so out of control that generating high enough tax revenues to deal with federal spending becomes impossible.

 

            Annual deficits are no longer related in any way to tax revenue.   Last year the Democratic-controlled congress refused to pass a budget . . . their most important duty according to the Constitution . . .  revenues were $1.1 TRillion and spending amounted to almost $3.7 TRillion and they want to raise the ceiling on the National Debt. Even if taxes tripled we’d still have run a significant deficit for the year . . . and yes, the interest on the debt runs to roughly $170 Billion yearly . . . all of that’s a sign that the crisis point has been passed.

 

Warning Indicator #4:   The political class begins to bail out and in doing so takes care of their cronies and of the masses to keep them under control -- all at the expense of the middle class. 

 

            Right now federal government unions; state and municipal unions; and other special interest groups are looting the U.S. and the 50 state treasuries. The Obama $787 Billion stimulus cost us a lot of free market real jobs, but the looters maintained and grew the government enormously while the rest of us suffered. $200 Billion per year is wasted on just the federal pensions; welfare amounts to $450 Billion per year; Social Security and Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid cost $1.8 TRillion and much of those funds is tied up in fraud, abuse and waste benefitting the political class . . . none of this was ever authorized by the U.S. Constitution . . . but wait, there’s more: remember national defense; border control and roads and all the other stuff the Constitution actually said the federal government must do? That an an equal amount on “discretionary spending that was never authorized by the Constitution amounst to roughly another $2.6 TRillion . . . aha, now you see why they didn’t want to create a budget! Tell me that a $5.1 TRillion budget with a $1.4 TRillion deficit wouldn’t shock the sensibilities of all sensible Americans. This warning indicator has been passed also.

 

Warning Indicator #5 The government will begin creating money out of thin air.

 

            Yes, this too has already happened. Between late October, 2008 and today, the Federal Reserve Bank has printed and electronically created “magic money” amounting to roughly 29 times the amount of dollars circulating in September, 2008. Technically speaking the 2011 U.S. dollar is now worth 3.4 pennies-worth of the September, 2008 Dollar. In other words, all those banana republics we used to laugh about . . . well, our money is becoming less valuable than theirs. As Stansberry & Associates financial advisors reminds us:  If printing money were truly good for an economy, Zimbabwe would be the world’s wealthiest country.”  Yet that's precisely what we're being told by our President and by our financial leaders . . . .  Our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has alternated between denying that he was “monetizing the debt” (a.k.a. “printing money”) and then defending the practice. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner denied the United States would ever resort to such “devaluation of the dollar” but it’s going on anyway; meanwhile Bernanke keeps busy explaining that it's not exactly "counterfeiting" what he's doing and it's actually good for the economy in the long run (not mentioning that it's a huge gamble with the future of the country and the planet in the short run). A planetwide “run on the dollar” could literally destroy our currency overnight. The whole world has warned about this; the credit-rating firms have pretended it’s not so, but expect it very soon.

 

Warning Indicator #6: We will not be able to repay our debts in the international community.

 

            America’s $55 TRillion international debt amounts to $681, 178 per each American family of four. The average income of American families amounts to less than $50,000 per year. Just the interest on our international debt amounts to $34,000 per family per year. And if we resort to the printing presses to print of more dollars to pay the debt (OOOOPS, I forgot, we’re already doing that!) Then, first the interest rates for borrowing will skyrocket; then people and nations will stop loaning money to America, period.   Friends, once that happens the printing presses can run day and night and there’s no helping us . . . yep, we’ve passed this crisis point, too. The world’s greatest creditor nation has within the 45 year lifetime of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” which ushered in Medicare and Medicaid and dramatically expanded welfare programs of all ilks become the greatest DEBTOR nation the planet has ever seen.

 

Warning Indicator #7:   American citizens will catch on and, discovering that debt has the potential someday to evaporate in hours, they personally will churn out new debt like a bullet-train parting the atmosphere.

           

            Despite all the talk of the American consumer “cutting back” and practicing austerity issuance of new debt in the United States is soaring. Public and private debt both reached record levels in 2010. The potential is that the economy will twist inside-out if this practice continues. This is the only one of the seven warning indicators that hasn’t yet come to pass.

 

IS THERE, INDEED, NO HOPE?

            Where there’s life there’s hope . . . . Rajjpuut believes the individual ought to prepare himself and his family and other loved ones for the very worst; while still striving to do everything possible to prevent those ills from befalling all of us.  The HOPE that exists lies with the actions of 
individuals protecting themselves^^ and quite frankly with the Republicans in the House of Representatives. UNLESS their actions signal a strong “about-face” to the rest of the world and to our nation’s financial momentum: we’re doomed within 18 months. Everything you and I can do as an individual and through leverage groups such as the TEA Party to change the fiscal- and Constitutional course of the nation must be done. Here’s a story to give us all hope.

            Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first Progressive president, indeed his personal “Bullmoose Party” was officially called the “Progressive Party.” TR was, thankfully, a great American patriot and his modest progressivism actually benefitted the nation for the most part leading to modernization of the navy, for one good example and the building of the Panama Canal (the land for which was actually stolen from Colombia and renamed “Panama”; not only progressive but unethical as well). Woodrow Wilson was, up till Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the most sinister progressive politician of them all. After running for a second term under the slogan “He kept us out of war,” within a month of his March, 1917 inauguration he put us into the European War. He left office with the nation undergoing the biggest depression up to that time. The conditions were much worse than what Herbert Hoover (another Republican Progressive) did himself in with. That late 1920 depression came to be known as “The Invisible Depression” after Wilson’s successor Warren G. Harding cut spending 49%; cut taxes 48%; and paid down the National Debt by 30% and was ended within 15 months . . . so it is possible to avert disaster but the Democrats seem to have embraced it and the Republicans must show the political will to do it pretty much on their own, with, of course, constant pressure from you and me.

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

 

 ^^  Purchasing a $100 face-value bag (or more) of "junk silver" might be the simplest most patriotic act you can do while saving yourself.  The bag would cost roughly $2,100 - $2,400 depending upon the value of silver when you buy.  IF and WHEN the currency fails, some sort of new money is going to be in high demand and the 90% silver dimes or quarters minted before 1965; are the most likely candites.  To a lesser extent the 40% silver money minted between 1965 to 1970 would also be accepted as a "new currency" but not nearly so readily as they will be worth 56% less than the 90% coins.

Some more important reading:

 

Here’s some other key reading that’ll shake the earth under most Americans’ feet:

 

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/10/26/obama,__to_gop,_%e2%80%9cride_in_back%e2%80%9d;_no_one_tells_truth.thtml

 

 http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/10/26/%e2%80%9chow_brainwashed_are_you%e2%80%9d_a_test_for_american_voters.thtm

 

All the worst ideas still plaguing America (and a lot of other bad ideas as well) right now are rooted in progressivism, all of them. Think of the worst UNfunded liabilities initiated for “all the best motives” and you’ve described  tyrannical progressivism to a “T.” Here are some of those ideas and the president’ in power when they began: 

1.       Truly Big Government: Teddy Roosevelt

2.     Government Control over large land tracts: Teddy Roosevelt

3.     The Federal Reserve Bank: Woodrow Wilson

4.     The Income Tax: Woodrow Wilson

5.     Fighting in Europe’s Wars: Woodrow Wilson

6.     Government propaganda: Woodrow Wilson

7.     Internment Camps: Woodrow Wilson

8.    Controlling (and shutting down) the press: Woodrow Wilson

9.     Government welfare programs: Herbert Hoover
10. Land banks and other agricultural subsidies:  Herbert Hoover

11.Ultra-high protective tariffs: Herbert Hoover

12. Huge Tax and Spend Government: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

13.Confiscation of Gold: FDR

14. Devaluing the Dollar to fill government coffers: FDR

15. Ultra-big Government: FDR

16.  Social Security: FDR

17.  Expansive Welfare: Lyndon Baines Johnson

18.  Medicare: LBJ

19. Medicaid: LBJ
19 1/2.  Taking silver out of money:  LBJ and Richard Nixon
 
20.  Leaving gold standard entirely:  Richard Nixon
 

21. Government Bailouts of Cities: Gerald Ford

22.             Government control of Mortgage Industry Jimmy Carter

23.   Government bailouts of Chrysler automobile company : Jimmy Carter
 
24.  Regulatory expansion of CRA 77:  Bill Clinton

25.     Expansions by fiat thrice by legislation to Carter’s CRA: Bill Clinton

26.     Motor Voter Act: Bill Clinton
 
27.     Medicare Part D:  G.W. Bush

28.    TARP bailouts: G.W. Bush

29.    Federal Government involved in bankruptcies: Barack Obama

30.   Nationalized Healthcare insurance: Barack Obama

31.   Government bailout  and control of auto companies: Barack Obama

32.   Government control of Banks: Barack Obama
 
33. 
Government control of student loans: Barack Obama

34.  Financial control “reform”: Barack Obama

35.  Bailouts of Banks and Wall Street:  Barack Obama

36.  State Socialism: Barack Obama

 

                

                Remembering the “Watermelon-Connection” wherein ultra-socialists “green on the outside and Deep RED on the inside” want to use Cap and Trade as a stepping-stone to government takeover of virtually everything because it practically requires nationalization of all of a nation’s enterprises; requires the all-powerful central government to control all decisions about what to produce, where to produce it, when to produce, where to market it, and how . . . . isn’t it fitting that Barack Obama and progressive-elitist and would-be president Kerry are so interested in this seriously flawed “science?”  And so looking over that unending list of failure every time serious government taxing, spending, control or interference is contemplated, Senator Kerry still just can’t understand why the masses of sheep are no longer following him to the slaughter house,  "It's absurd. We've lost our minds," he keeps repeating.

 

 

 

 

Read more…

 

 
Repairing the American Republic
in Ten** Years
 
          Barack Obama is purportedly the “leader of the free world,” but all his political manipulations in the last two years have borne an ultra-socialist flavor and made America a much less free country; threatened the role of the American dollar as the “world’s reserve currency”; and done everything possible to kill the free markets’ abilities to return us to our natural position as the world’s leading economy. Here’s how we change all that and return the country to its former excellence:
 
 
  1. Immediately cut all federal salaries 15% and keep them frozen at this level until the budget is balanced and all UNfunded liabilities are funded.
  2. Otherwise cut all federal spending by 10% and similarly freeze it at those levels until the budget is balanced and all UNfunded liabilities are funded.
  3. Amend the Constitution to include a balanced budget amendment except in times of invasion of our country budget must balance and no future liabilities may go UNfunded.
  4. Amend the Constitution so that Unfunded liabilities are unconstitutional.
  5. Amend the Constitution so that the Federal Government has no power to demand state spending on Federal Programs.
  6. Initiate a flat very low income tax beginning at $30,000 earnings per person with no deductions allowed to anyone.  Every dollar earned above $30,000 by an individual is taxed at 16% by the federal government. For married couples every dollar earned above $70,000 is taxed at $16%.
  7. The corporate income tax for America is now the highest in the world. Drop it for ten years to a flat 5% on all earnings above $150,000 and jobs and businesses will flood back into this country.
  8. Put the country back on a hard money standard: one ounce of silver = $100 or (but NOT and) gold = $5,000 per ounce.
  9. Eliminate Federal Reserve banking and all the inflationary power that goes with it.
  10. Make unemployment insurance a purely federal program; cut unemployment insurance duration to 13 weeks.
  11. Set up a commission to eliminate duplicate or unnecessary programs or unconstitutional programs; and to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse of federal programs and require this commission to report to congress and the president every year two weeks before the State of the Union report by the president.
Eliminate Obamacare and
a.     Allow all citizens and businesses and states to shop across state borders for health care insurance
b.   Provide tort reform to eliminate nuisance malpractice suits and cap tort awards at $1,200,000
c.    Put the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in charge of improving Americans’ health and lowering medical costs.
d.   Reduce Medicare and Medicaid coverage to levels existing in 2000. There will be zero state Medicare or Medicaid coverage . . . only federal coverage at these new levels will exist.
 e.    Re-establish HSA’s as programs which people can use to responsibly plan their own health care funding protection
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
**It's too big a job for any "instant fix," so not all will be repaired in ten years but the government will be 100% on the right track within three years
By the way, you may recall President Obama telling us that too much information was a bad, even dangerous, thing and recommending that we just read the Huffington Post to avoid confusion . . . .    Well, get this the owner of the HP website Arianna Huffington has declared that the  leftwing progressives “are responsible for all that’s good in America, 100%”. Does she mean the shrinking dollar? $112 TRillion in UNfunded liabilities just courtesy of Social Security; Medicare; and the federal side of Medicaid (not to mention that the new Obamacare legislation will, via the state side of Medicaid bankrupt every state but Utah and Texas by 2022; and all fifty by 2024)? Government and unionized government pensions bankrupting 43 of our states right now?
 
“(By her description of the left), every single breakthrough in American politics from the Emancipation Proclamation onward was a left-wing initiative and espoused by the left,” Huffington declared this week on her website.
 
 
Read more…

As Ben Bernanke Deliberately Collapses

the American Dollar, George Soros Chortles

For lack of a better name, call it the OJCP, "Obama Jobs Creation^^ Program": your money is deliberately being made worth less or worthless to spur jobs creation. The plan is that foreigners will want to get rid of dollars and buy American goods, thus creating jobs. Foreign goods will become too expensive for Americans who will decide to buy American goods instead, presto, again more jobs created here. Doesn't that sound wonderful? The chief architect of all this with Mr. Obama is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke who is also initiating something called "quantitative easing."

The reserve currency of the entire world for lo’ these many years has been the American dollar. Within the last couple years George “The Puppet Master” Soros (the world’s 35th richest man and its single greatest megalomaniacal communist who already has thrice profited fantastically by bringing about the collapse of some nation’s currency) told the world press that a controlled devaluation of the American dollar was necessary for the good of the world community. The interview was not widely covered in this country, but his comment sent ripples throughout the world especially among those foreign governments who hold U.S. dollars. The legendary Mr. Soros who bankrolls a good ten non-profit groups involved in getting the United States into the shark-filled Cap and Trade waters, by the way, is advocating Cap and Trade** legislation as a way out of our present crisis.

Within the last 18 months, both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Bank Chief Ben Bernanke swore that America would never devaluate the dollar, would never resort to inflation as a way to deal with our incredible debt, would never sabotage the American people and those who hold debt instruments from the American treasury . . . . Yep, they lied. The terms “Q1” and “Q2” are now becoming familiar to Americans who do other things than watch sitcoms and “reality” shows on TV. “Quantitative easing” has taken place in both of the last two fiscal quarters.

The Quantitative Easing which Mr. Bernanke is taking us through is a polite way to say that the government is deliberately making toilet paper of your savings, pension funds, etc. That’s what the government is doing. Rajjpuut first mentioned the German Weimar Republic back in a blog in early 2004. The astute Mr. Glen Beck of the Fox News cable network has this very month said that America is now heading for a “Weimar Moment.” The Weimar Republic was the government forced upon Germany when they lost World War I. The infamous Treaty of Versailles also forced upon Germany an impossible set of reparations payments. In order to deal with the demands from the victorious French, the Germans had to inflate their currency. The Deutsch Mark which was worth 25 cents (four DM to the dollar) in 1917 deteriorated so rapidly that in November, 1923; it took 26 Billion Deutsch Marks to equal a dollar. You may also remember November, 1923, as the time when Adolf Hitler led a group of dissatisfied individuals in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch (coup d’état) trying to usurp the government of Bavaria. The resulting trial for treason made Hitler a household name across Germany. Such are the benefits of state-sponsored inflation . . . .

In October of 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, Mr. Bernanke took it upon himself (there are virtually no limits to the power of a Federal Reserve chief’s to inflict intended or unintended pain) to begin printing up money. When he was done he’d printed up 14 times as many new bills as there were dollars previously in circulation so in total: 15 times as much money was circulating as before. In effect, the potential effect on the dollar was that the 20o9 dollar was worth 6.7 cents worth of 2008 money . . . NICE!

In the summer of 2010 when it became difficult to sell American debt instruments because foreign governments were reluctant to risk buying up dollar instruments without a much higher interest rate, the federal government in the form of Mr. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve Bank began printing again and bought up some of the Treasury instruments that were on sale, about one-third of them. This is called “monetizing debt” something you’ll recall from the top of this blog that Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke promised would never happen. That didn’t seem to have cured the problems so now Ben’s busy again with the printing presses and monetizing more debt a.k.a. quantitative easing . . . Q1 earlier; Q2 now. Back when Q1 was going on you might recall, Rajjpuut telling Americans to buy gold or silver because paper dollars were becoming worth less and eventually might prove worthless. Now Rajjpuut says that Americans should buy things of value like gold or silver, etc. because “worthless” is the watchword for the dollar. Of course, in ignorance the stock market investors believe Q2 is a good idea and the stock market is shooting up . . . dance while you can, boys, the bill’s coming due. Aren’t you glad “they” are looking out for us in Washington?

Here is the straight skinny and Rajjpuut crosses his heart while typing this: The crisis in the world’s finances comes down to one thing and one thing only . . . a crisis in the American dollar. The U.S. National Debt is almost $14 TRillion. Unfunded liabilities (owed by the country to the citizens) amounts to roughly $110 TRillion. We are by far the greatest debtor nation the world has ever known. While scarfing down junk food and watching American Idol a few other simple facts have escaped the good citizens . . . .

ITEM: Americans are not aware that the U.S. (private controlled central bank) Federal Reserve Bank, creates money out of thin air, is the primary cause of inflation in America, abets the politicians in their horrendous spending, and abets the creation of financial bubbles in the stock market and real estate.

ITEM: The American mainstream media (MSM) are largely “controlled” by their allegiance to the progressive elements in the Democratic and Republican parties. The MSM which did not report on Climategate when it happened one year ago, has also kept the American people ignorant of the coming crisis. Call it “mind control,” if you choose. Just five or six major corporations run the largest of the media outlets. When it comes to the broadcast media: Disney owns ABC, CBS is owned by Viacom, GE owns NBC all of whom are in bed with the progressive agenda in Washington and have a vested interest in keeping Americans entertained, dumb and happy rather than informed about the truth behind Cap and Trade and the value of their dollars.

ITEM: Not only have ultra-progressive George Soros’ words and activities gone unreported, but the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank, both have already said the dollar will be devalued. However, this has never been reported in the US media.

ITEM: President Clinton’s former economic adviser Robert Reich recently told Canadians that the U.S. dollar will collapse. Again, NOT reported.

ITEM: Collapse or “devaluation” of the dollar means a decline in the dollar’s purchasing power and a huge decline in Americans’ living standard. No one wants to hold a currency declining in value so they must demand higher prices for their goods and services and can use the dollars they receive to bid up the cost of whatever they buy from America in order to get rid of the dollars they hold as quickly as p0ssible.

Item: Today, Barack Obama made several monetary deals with India. Overtly we were told it was “a natural union between the world’s two most populous democracies.” In reality, Obama seeing that China is becoming reluctant to buy dollars was looking for a trade-partner who would be more or less forced by the agreement to keep the dollar respectfully in its hallowed place as a “reserve currency” . . . thus he hopes easing some of the pain the decline will bring to Americans by sharing that turmoil with India.

Item: The world will flee to gold, silver and other precious metals; to the Swiss Franc; and even to the recently despised Euro. Commodities of all kinds can be expected to rise in price FAST.

Ultimately what can we expect? For one thing the rest of the world understands our own crisis far more than our own leaders have informed us about it. So . . . expect a run to get out of the dollar . . . call it “hot potato economics.” People are going to be eager to discard the almighty buck and to buy whatever they can with it, rather than being the last one holding it. Of course that will happen among highly aware foreigners like the Chinese government, or the governments of Russsia, Brazil, Japan and India(?) long before the man in the street in America figures it all out. So expect a brief boom in America. And expect prices of our American products especially foodstuffs to go through the roof . . . so besides gold or silver, it might be nice to have a supply of canned and packaged and non-perishable food on hand while prices are comparatively cheap . . . as a result of these sad truths, expect huge amounts of unrest in the inner cities; expect huge amounts of problems for senior citizens and others living on fixed incomes. Expect George Soros to chortle all the way to the bank . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut
^^Barack’s OJCP based upon devaluing the dollar is an immensely poor idea for three reasons:

#1 Inflation is tricky and can become devastating runaway inflation and even hyper-inflation destroying a civilization.

#2 When a currency as important as the dollar starts to devalue, no other country wants to import our joblessness, so you can expect demoralizing “currency wars” where dozens of nations seek to devalue their currencies and save jobs. Japan and China have received much criticism for devaluing their currencies but their money is NOT the world’s reserve currency . . . . world chaos would ensue if serious dollar deflation was allowed.

#3 Success at devaluation is close akin to success at swallowing thumb tacks and sure to “get you in the end.” Money is a storehouse of value (some call it “frozen work”) so why not attack your brand new car with a sledgehammer? The effect is the same . . . taking something of value and making it worth less or even worthless. Even if the only effect was upon imports and exports, that would be a tragic result. 19% of the U.S. economy is tied up with imports, drop the value of the dollar and 19% of what we buy becomes much more expensive.

In effect, the OJCP Obama Jobs Creation Program is just making us all much poorer. It’s not exactly sawing a lady in half to create jobs by making the country poorer . . . the magic comes from creating jobs by making us all wealthier like Donald Trump and Bill Gates do . . . not only making themselves richer; but making their stockholders richer; and their workers richer; and providing deep value to their customers. That’s the magic of capitalism which Barack so hates. Remove the minimum wage; remove health care and all benefits; make everyone on unemployment work for $5 daily and you’d have full employment in a month . . . and a much poorer nation as well for at least the three years it would take for a booming capitalism to regenerate our prosperity.

Everyone knows the following discussion is the truth . . . think of it as you ponder what you’ve learned already about the evils of devaluing the dollar:

Many have had to settle for lower wages to keep their jobs.

Many have had to settle for lower hours to keep their jobs.

Many have had to settle for part-time work to keep their jobs.

Many on part-time schedules have found themselves ineligible for the benefits they’ve formerly received.

Many have lost their jobs.

Many have lost higher paying jobs and now work elsewhere for less.

Or they've lost higher paying jobs and can only find work that pays less for mandatory unpaid overtime.

Many have had to take two or three jobs to survive working up to 90-100 hours weekly.

Many lost co-pays, deductibles, or seen eligibility times soar on their health insurance.

Many find that employers can longer match their401(k) contributions.

Many older workers have found themselves dispensible.

Many have lost their pensions.

Some workplaces where experienced older workers are valued have instituted two-tier wage systems. New hires get far lower wages and far less benefits.

Wage-freezes attack many workers in the long run as inflation eats into their present constant wage.

What does this mean? It means that anyone can create jobs by making everyone poorer, no struggle at all. The magic comes from capitalism creating not only more jobs, but better and more valuable jobs. The goal isn't just more jobs, Mr. Obama. It's about creating more jobs that pay enough to improve our living standards. Using a dramatically weakened dollar to create more jobs doesn't really help us.

** if we had Cap and Trade laws in effect right now, the immediate effect would be 67% inflation on average and inflation on food, electricity and gasoline and other necessities closer to 100%. Where does that 67% inflation figure come from? Founder and President of the Chicago Climate Exchange Richard Sandor (other influentials involved include Obama, Franklin Raines, Joel Rogers, John Ayers, Valerie Jarret, etc. and the Chicago ShoreBank supported by Hillary and Bill Clinton as well as ten or more progressive foundations financed by George Soros) put the value of Cap and Trade as an industry at $10 TRillion. In good times the real U.S. economy amounts to $15 TRillion. On paper, that means that selling blue-sky nothingness (that’s what Cap and Trade basically does) is “worth” 67% of the real U.S. economy. So in a $25 TRillion economy including Cap and Trade . . . 40% of the economy is literally “nothing” and that 40% is being stolen from the real economy by the crooks running the CCX. Note: Obama said directly in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that his energy plan would “bankrupt the coal industry” and “necessarily make electricity prices skyrocket.” So it’s actually far more likely in reality that the whole U.S. economy would amount to $20 TRillion and half of that economy would be Cap and Trade not only running prices up 100% but reducing the standard of living by 33% at least.

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The British National Health Care System has calculated that a human life is worth $45,000 . . . Obama recess-appointee Donald Berwick calls himself, ". . . in love with the British system . . . "

Even Gold Taxation Part of Obamacare

Infamously, the Squeaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi told us “we’ll have to pass it, so you can find out what’s in it . . . .” and then she promised us, “. . . but, you’ll like it.” Clearly she was lying again. Obamacare (though it was only one bill) created almost 390 brand new U.S. government agencies (almost ten times as much as FDR created in 12+ years in office):

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/jul/26/letters-to-the-editor-monday/?partner=yahoo_feeds

Item: The link above shows you that the Brits value a human life at $45,000. And Donald Berwick has said, "I am in love with the British system." Why exactly is that important? Consider this, Lee Iacocca before he went to Chrysler to bankrupt them and earn them their 1979 bailout, worked at Ford and is most infamous for designing the Pinto with its exploding gas tanks. As early as 1972 (38 years ago) Iacocca had put such stringent limits on Pinto design as far as costs, weight, passenger compartment maximum volume, trunk minimum volume, etc. that when he and his toadies were presented with evidence of the potential for catastrophic failure of the Pinto, he refused to add a $9.95 fix that would have made the Pinto a perfectly safe automobile. The reason? At that time the cost of a human life was reckoned by insurance anlaysis at precisely $200,000 and cost-benefit analysis said the Pinto would be more profitable without the $9.95 per car safety improvement. It was literally "all about 'trunk^^ space' " according to insider testimony. Well, in the case of Donald Berwick, Barack Obama and Obamacare, it's all about coffin space.

Item: As the Republicans told you, there are NO provisions for controlling costs or improving health, not one.

Item: The elderly will definitely now pay for a much, much larger percentage of their own healthcare costs . . . soon with their fixed incomes ravaged by inflation (more on that later).

Item: Unlike what Bart Stupak said Obama promised him, federally funded elective abortions are now the law of the land. Remember that fellow that yelled out “You liar!” when Obama was addressing the congress and the president said that abortion would NOT be covered, well he was correct but will NOT be getting apologies any time soon, now will he? The very first two institutions to set up shop for Obamacare in New Mexico and Pennsylvania began by immediately providing for abortion coverage. Regardless of your particular stance on abortion, one thing 78% of Americans agree upon is that the U.S. government should NOT pay for elective non-health threatening surgeries with abortion #1 on their "don't pay list."

Item: we now know beyond a doubt, the deficits and national debt will surge rather than shrink because of Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has dramatically ratcheted up its evaluation of Obamacare costs and of course they didn't even consider the separate "doctor-fix" that congress just passed.

Item: You will be able to keep your same health care insuror and same doctor only if you’re lucky. Most likely if you’re part of a small- or medium-sized business, your employer will be forced by the economics of the issue (expense!) to abandon providing health care for his/her employees and pay a less expensive fine for not doing so. You’ll then have to provide your own health insurance, sorry 'bout that.

Item: As Obama’s new healthcare head (recess-appointee of a yet another communist, not just socialist, on the sly) Donald Berwick has informed us, this socialized medicine approach known as Obamacare WILL indeed be “rationing healthcare” and must "by definition, to be just" indeed “be redistributional.” Berwick is a real winner. He describes himself as a "fan of socialized medicine but everything about him revealed in his published works goes light years beyond mere socialism. He believes that intelligent planning by people like him is best for you, especially in health care. He is also essentially a phony: the Washington Times reported that two Harvard professor positions claimed for Dr. Berwick were essentially "honorary" posts with minor teaching and administrative duties. He has described himself as "in love with the British National Health Care System," which has 1.6 times the percentage of cancer deaths as we do here in America. A system where long waits have repeatedly and constantly been written up in the English press as causes of tragedies where people in their emergency rooms die of dehydration and bleed to death or asphyxiate while waiting to be seen..

http://blogs.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/7/recess-move-draws-bipartisan-fire/

http://eyeblast.tv/public/video.aspx?v=XdZukUuz2G

Item: What Obamacare definitely does do is: in time wipe out the health insurance industry; create 390 new government bureaucracies; extend government control over Americans to life and death matters (sorry, Grandma, but it’s just too expensive, the government won’t pay for it); create long waiting lines for services; provide for abortions funded by the government (you can bet they won’t be rationed!); and add to the mountains of debt. The appointment of Donald Berwick will make the American health care system a device for population control by medical rationing. Read debt, death, long lines, poor quality care as well.

Item: There are many surprises, but here’s an example of just how invasive the bill is into every day life. If, you like Rajjpuut, see the government’s invasion into every aspect of our daily lives as certain to prompt inflation, than runaway inflation and ultimately*** hyper-inflation – you may have considered putting some money into gold. One of the Obamacare provisions will now tax gold coin and bullion transactions (nothing wrong with taxing profits, but taxing every single transaction amounts to a federal sales tax which is, at the moment unconstitutional). That tax itself and the amount of paperwork required will make gold transactions much more expensive. So much for trying to look out for yourself because the government was inflating the currency . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

^^ Figuratively "all about trunk space" means that putting every single item, including human life, into a dollar and cents evaluation of cost versus benefit was the corporate mindset of Iacocca's Pinto division when they made their decisions; and the fault was NOT all with them. Apparently every one of their studies and those of their competitors literally showed that car buyers were about Eight times more likely to reject an automobile based upon trunk space than its safety features or lack of them. Stupid on both ends, eh?

*** because the Federal Reserve Bank printed 14 times as many dollars in 2009 as were circulating in 2008, technically each 2010 dollar is now worth about 6.6 cents in 2008 money. 14 + 1 = 15 times as much money in circulation so with 100 pennies in each dollar 100/15 = 6.6 cents

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Obama-watchers here in the United States tell anyone who’ll listen that to understand our future, one has but to look at the shenanigans in Greece. Recently world stock markets include the ones here in the good ol’ U.S.A. tanked in response to the European Union/International Monetary Fund $150 Billion bailout of Greece. The three major fears concerning financial analysts are that either 1. the loan will NOT prove enough to cover Greece’s needs either for borrowing or the upward spiraling of debt or 2. the German parliament will not approve the bailout (voting is Friday May 6, in Germany) or 3. a combination of both scenarios. Just two and a half years ago Greece had a debt to gross domestic product ratio of roughly 55%, comparable to what the U.S. faced when President Obama took office (50%), but today Greece’s D/GDP ratio is at 102% and not only is the country facing financial ruin but there is literally “blood in the streets” as the all-powerful Greek labor unions are rioting in opposition to the belt-tightening being negotiated by the Greek government in order to receive the EU loans.

While Rajjpuut is NOT a fan of big and politically powerful labor unions, in the union’s favor it must be stated that the government of Greece has been guilty of outright lying and manipulating debt with “funny” statistics for about a decade now and the news that came out when the truth finally was released was more than shocking, it was abysmal. Oh, and for you Obama-watchers here, the D/GDP ratio in the United States has now risen to 76%.

To put things in perspective, and thus realize just how badly off the economies of Greece (also Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal) and the United States are, consider that the next worst of the European countries (England) had a ratio of only 11% w hen the following memorable speech linked immediately below was made to the EU by Daniel Hannan criticizing the actions of Prime Minister Gordon Brown a year ago. England’s ratio now is roughly 14% . . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs

Many believe that Greece’s “contagion” will spread quickly to the other “PIGIES” (the next five weakest countries in Europe mentioned earlier, Greece is the "G") with one-time European financial bulwark Spain possibly the next to go. Spain about seven years ago had the strongest fiscal situation of any European power. Then they decided upon a critical experiment (one that Obama wants to work over here) and aimed to become the world’s #1 power in green technology. Spain’s 3% unemployment has spiraled all out of control and is now at 20%, second only to Greece’s problems. In the Spanish experience every green-tech job created cost $677,000 in government subsidies and killed 2.2 jobs in the real market place because of government spending and taxation. Most Spanish green jobs lasted from six weeks to nine months and only 1/10 of them proved permanent. In the United States that would translate to Obama’s promised “five million new green jobs” costing the loss of eleven more real economy jobs to subsidize them; and then with only 500,000 of those jobs proving permanent and a 22/1 ratio of lost real jobs to permanent green tech jobs. Additionally the typical green job pays $10-$14 per hour which is a huge letdown to most Americans’ way of thinking about new technologies.

The violence created in the streets by the Greek labor unions cost three bank employees their lives two days ago. The unions say they’ll refuse to make any financial concessions. Their intransigence might worsen the Greek debt situation or repel the other EU countries completely. As for Germany’s hesitation, the Germans suffered one of the two greatest inflations in European history (during the Weimar Republic after WWI, which eventually spawned Adolph Hitler and the Nazis) and the country is loathe to get involved with the fiscally irresponsible Greek government at risk of inflation to their own country. However, German Prime Minister Merkel has made it plain in her speeches that the “survival of the European Union is at stake.” Once again the European experience may prove to be a harbinger of things to come for the USA, because Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has inflated our money by 1500% so that now there is 1600% more money in circulation in the country and today’s 2010 dollar is now potentially worth only about 6.3 cents compared to the 2008 buck. Of course in this country we're talking about fifty individual states in financial disarry not twenty-four separate countries.

Worse news for Greece, the violence and fiscal unrest don’t look like they’ll be ending anytime soon. If that ugly scenario keeps repeating the EU may not loan the money and Germany's refusal also could be in the cards. And the possibility of a worldwide depression is always on investors’ minds. Additionally, with the latest round of worries that the Greek debt contagion will spread to Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The looming specter of massive debt default and deflation is heavy in the air for investors worldwide and fear dominates the markets. All this and unending days of national strike are NOT painting an encouraging scene.

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery.

Rajjpuut

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