Category: Uncategorized

Interest Rates in a Gold Coin Standard

Gary North

Lew Rockwell.com, 22 December 2011

Americans are living in a world of central bank profligacy. This has been true ever since 1914, when the Federal Reserve System opened for business. But the most recent bank-created economic crisis, which began in December 2007, has received more attention than ever before. This is mainly the result of Ron Paul's 2007 candidacy for the Republican nomination for President. He warned that this crisis would happen. He also spelled out the reasons: Federal Reserve policy. Then the crisis hit.

The Federal Reserve lost its immunity from criticism in 2008-9. It will never get it back. It also lost its invisibility. The general public now has some limited awareness of the FED. The FED gets a lot of negative publicity. This to a positive development.

This has also created a problem. Some of the critics of the Federal Reserve System propose a solution worse than the FED itself: the creation of a fiat-money based central bank that creates money out of nothing to pay for government-funded projects.

Read full article.

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.

Phi Beta Iota:  Instead of a national currency it may be time to revert to local currencies based on tangible assets (land, labor, time) and gradually reconstitute the economy from the bottom-up.  What does NOT appear to be a trustworthy nor viable approach is a federal currency backed by nothing–the US has LOST its full faith and credit.  A federal solution has three strikes:  corruption on how much money to print; corruption on who gets the money; and corruption on policy objectives–there is no strategy at the federal level, lacking as it is in both intelligence and integrity.

See Also:

Henry Ford's Idea Backed by Thomas Edison

Top 12 Trends 2012

1.  Economic Martial Law–then Military?

2.  Battlefield America–attempted end to liberties.

3.  Invasin of the Occtupy.

4.  Climax time–financial implosion (2013?)

5.  Technocrat takeover–bottom up fights back.

6.  Repatriate! Repatriate (and re-nationalize).

7.  Secession Obsession–take your IRS and TSA and stick it.

8.  Safe Havens–Guns Gold and Getaway.

9.  Big Brother's Internet–no free speech, thinking is treason.

10.  Direct vs. Faux Democracy–Swiss model spreads.

11.  Alternative Energy 2012–end of the oil monopoly.

12.  Going out in style–design for poor people.

Source with paragraph for each of the above.

The Corruption of America

Porter Stansberry, December 21st, 2011

Stansberry Research

The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse.

. . . . . . .

I know this is a politically charged and emotional issue. My conclusions will not be easy for most readers to accept. Likewise, many of the things I am writing about this month will challenge my subscribers to re-examine what they believe about their country. The facts about America today tell a painful story about a country in a steep decline, beset by problems of its own making.

. . . . . . .

The only real way to accurately measure per-capita GDP is to build our own model. The need to build our own tools tells you something important – the government doesn’t want anyone to know the answer to this question. It could easily publish data far more accurate than the indexes it puts out. But government doesn’t want anyone to know. And it wants to be able to say “those aren’t the real data” when studies like ours produce bad news.

So pay attention to how we built our charts. You can see for yourself that our data are far more accurate than the government’s figures. Our data are based on the real purchasing power of the currency, not the nominal numbers, which are completely meaningless in the real world.

Below the Line: The entire article with charts.

Continue reading “Yoda: The Corruption of America”

Worse Than 2008

Submitted by ChrisMartenson.com

ZeroHedge, 21 December 2011

There are clear signs of a liquidity crunch in the asset markets right now, and the question I keep hearing is, Is this 2008 all over again?

No, it’s worse. Much worse.

In 2008 there was a lot more faith and optimism upon which to draw. But both have been squandered to significant degrees by feckless regulators and authorities who failed to properly address any of the root causes of the first crisis even as they slathered layer after layer of thin-air money over many of the symptoms.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that those “magic potions” proved to be anything but. Not only are the root causes still with us (too much debt, vast regional financial imbalances, and high energy prices), but they have actually grown worse the entire time.

As always, we have no idea exactly what is going to happen and when, but we can track the various stresses and strains, noting that more and wider fingers of instability increase the risk of a major event. Heading into 2012, there's enough data to warrant maintaining an extremely cautious stance regarding holding onto one's wealth and increasing one's preparations towards resilience.

Here’s the evidence:

• Oil prices higher now than in 2009
• Derivatives up more than $100 trillion since 2009
• Government debts exploding
• Weak GDP growth
• Europe in trouble
• Small investors leaving the market
• China hitting a wall

One of the most important things we need to track is simply untrackable, and that is market perception. When faith in a faith-based money system vanishes, the game is pretty much over.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Josh Kilbourn: 2012 Will Be MUCH Worse Than 2008”

What Does The Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street?

By Brent Cox

The AWL, October 25, 2011

They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army or Bonus Marchers for short, and in 1932 they set-up semi-permanent encampments in Washington D.C. Nearly 80 years later, people are occupying Wall Street, and many, many other places around the country. And as loud as the shouts of deliberate mass media ignorance were a month ago, the Occupy movement is not all over everything, and it’s as difficult to avoid coverage now as it was to find it then. It seems to be a unique construct, a product of now—nonviolent, persistent and inchoate in the sense of there's too much to say (rather than not being able to say it). But they're walking in someone else’s footprints, whether they know it or not.

. . . . . .

The two movements shared an analogous backdrop. Just as Occupy Wall Street unfolds in the shadow of the fiscal crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, the Bonus Army congregated in the full bloom of the Great Depression. Without the downturn, neither protest actually could have happened. There was even a specific federal program that inflamed each: instead of the TARP program that doled out free taxpayer money to financial institutions recently, Hoover had established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity to save the large banks and railroads through government loans, just months before the Bonus Army declared their march. So both the Bonus Army and Occupy Wall Street were set into motion in response to almost deliberately provocative federal policy, and the economic horror show that necessitated it.

And as Occupy Wall Street has current celebrities, the Susan Sarandons and Alec Baldwins, the Kanye Wests and the Jeff Mangums, stopping by, the Bonus Army had one of the more popular military figures of the time, Gen. (Ret.) Smedley Butler, then the most decorated Marine ever, visit and give a pep speech:
Men, I ran for the Senate in Pennsylvania on a bonus ticket. I got the hell beaten out of me. But I haven’t changed my mind a damned bit. I’m here because I’ve been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can’t resist the temptation to be among soldiers. Hang together and stick it out till the gates of Hell freeze over; if you don’t, you’re no damn good. Remember, by God, you didn’t win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders. Don’t break any laws and allow people to say bad things about you. If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind you will lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.

Read full article, includes photos and video.

 

On January 21, as a part of our Nationwide Day of Action to overturn Citizens United v. FEC and end corporate rule, Public Citizen is working with local activists to ‘apprehend’ corporate impostors posing as ‘people’ with the same constitutional rights as the rest of us.

We'll be exposing these impostors to the light of day in cities and towns throughout the nation, and together with local activists we'll be calling on their elected officials to support a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United and end corporate domination of our democracy.

Comment: For those in NYC who are interested, visit this event webpage and this flyer (front & back). This is not just a one day event but will become an on-going effort to publicly expose corporate connections to the political and legal systems and move from protest to reconciliation.

Also See:

Event: Jan 20, 2012 – Occupy the Courts!

History of Corporate Personhood — How Lewis Powell & US Chamber of Commerce Bought the US Supreme Court

Corporationsarenotpeople.com

Story of Stuff Animation of Citizens United vs FEC ruling

Clarence Thomas getting support in the form of $100,000 worth of commercials from Citizens United in 1991

See #10 definition of person in US code and 15A for definition of “United States”

Alecexposed.org

Who's Who of Top Political Donors

Politicalpartytime.org – Party Time, a blog from the Sunlight Foundation that tracks political fundraisers

Alert citizens appear to have Americans Elect fully understood.  It could still be captured for good, but right now it is corrupt beyond imagination.

Enhancing Democracy or Strengthening the Emerging Oligarchy: Which Will It Be?

Joseph Firestone

Corrente, 19 December 2011

EXTRACT:

This is the fifth in a series of posts on some of these new web-based platforms and how they relate to this central question of oligarchy vs. democracy. The first, “A System-Changing Solution for the OWS Movement?”, which I co-authored with Nancy Bordier, compared and contrasted two alternatives available to OWS, the Interactive Voter Choice System and Americans Elect (AE). The second focused on AE. The third analyzed No Labels (NL), and the fourth covered Ruck.us. Here, I’ll explore in more detail the question of the relationships among AE, No Labels, and Ruck.us, and explicitly consider the possibility of some combination of the three organizations, whether formal or informal, working together to impact the political system. I’ll also discuss the likely implications of such a combination for the American body politic.

Read full analysis.

See Also:

Beware “Americans Elect” [Ron Paul the Daily Paul]

Irregular Times on Americans Elect Fraud

Third Party Group “Americans Elect” – A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? [Daily Kos]

Will “Americans Elect” Their President in 2012? [OpEd News]

Americans Elect Part IV: Paying Big Money for Signatures [Oregon]

Americans Elect: The Truth Behind the Corporate Scheme to Swipe the 2012 Election

Richard Winger: US Ballot Access & Americans Elect