Commentary  &  Opinion 

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by Free Market Duck

(Note: To contact FM Duck, please send email to FreeMarketDuck@hotmail.com  To prevent spam, please insert the word Quack Off in your email's subject line.  Thanks.)

12-28-2011
The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe  More...

12-13-2011
Forget Britain's David Cameron Veto, Another Eurozone Crisis is Only Weeks Away  More...

12-11-2011
How Does Europe Borrow Dollars from the Fed?  More...

12-08-2011
Fix Was In:  The Stock Market Was Rigged  More...

11-15-2011
European Ponzi Goes Full Retard as EFSF Found to Monetize... Itself  More...

11-09-2011
Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid  More...

11-04-2011
Hell Explained by a Chemistry Student  More...

10-25-2011
Understanding Derivatives and The Bailout  More...

09-15-2011
The European Crisis  More...

07-24-2011
Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later  More...

05-20-2011
Obama Offers Israeli PM Pork Chops Laced with Cyanide  More...

04-19-2011
Budget cuts are meaningless without Federal Reserve transparency  More...

Old Nuclear News Revisited in the next 2 articles written three years ago at FM Duck and even more applicable today since Japan's recent nuclear catastrophe:

02-22-2008
Idaho Legies create Perfect Storm:  yellowcake plus Yellowstone plus Snake Plain Aquifer equals radioactive Super Volcanic blast  More...

03-25-2008
Gov Butch Otter signs corporate welfare Bill for $2 billion Uranium-235 enrichment plant to set Idaho up for Perfect Nuclear Storm:  a radioactive, volcanic firestorm on top of Snake Plain Aquifer's Lake Erie  More...

03-01-2011
A Union Education...or
What Wisconsin reveals about public workers and political power  More...

02-14-2011
Idaho Statesman claims "nullification" of Obamacare is "immoral"  More...

02-03-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 3 of 3  More...

02-02-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 2 of 3  More...

01-29-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 1 of 3  More...

01-15-2011
Toward Sensible Monetary Policy  More...

12-17-2010
What's wrong with our current Education System?  A Libertarian Discussion that asks, "What is Education?"  ... and better yet, what should Education Be?  More...

12-09-2010
WikiLeaks 1941  More...

12-05-2010
Billions Flushed Down Political Toilet in Afghanistan  More...

11-25-2010
How many different U.S. Governments are busy running America?  More...

11-24-2010
Financial Reckoning Day  More...

11-21-2010
Idaho on the Verge of Bankruptcy in 2012  More...

10-30-2010
New silver class action invokes RICO against JP Morgan, HSBC  More...

10-30-2010
Idaho Voters, Who Should You Vote For... and Which Amendments?  More...

10-27-2010
Federal Reserve Commits Treason as it Asks 18 Major Banks How Much Money They Want the Fed to Give Them to “Stimulate” the Economy:  $250 Billion, $500 Billion, $1 Trillion, $2 Trillion or More…  More...

10-19-2010
545 People  More...

10-10-2010
Central banks create $4.7 trillion mortgage foreclosure debacle with fractional reserve monetary concepts  More...

10-04-2010
Idaho Voters Asked to Vote Away Their Rights to Vote... Huh?  More...

10-01-2010
Obama's Three Economic Fallacies..., or
Why He Doesn't Get It  More...

09-25-2010
Socialist Double Speak: Why Aren't Boise's Sales Tax Exemptions Considered a Stimulus to the Economy?  More...

09-18-2010
Energy - Part 3 of 3
Why Are We Still Drilling for Oil When We have Tesla's Free Radiant Energy?  More...

08-31-2010
U.S. Government Mint to Sell Jr. Federal Printing Presses to U.S. Citizens…  More...

08-29-2010
Boise's Ada County Detox Center Bankrupt Within One Year as Cities Refuse to Cough Up the Dough to Pay for it…  More...

08-24-2010
America - a walking dead-zombie country…  More...

07-09-2010
Energy - Part 2 of 3
The Asteroid Belt and How It Got there After the Planet Phaeton Blew up... Will History Repeat itself?…  More...

06-21-2010
Energy - Part 1 of 3
BP's Quest for Time
The Well from Hell... and What They're Not Saying…  More...

06-03-2010
Carbs against Cardio…  More...

05-11-2010
$145 Billion and Counting…  More...

03-25-2010
The One Thing…  More...

03-24-2010
The difference between sound money and our current pulp fiction Dollar, or...why Idaho Legislators should vote "yes" on House Bills 622 and 633…  More...

03-12-2010
California Grinds to a Halt as Public and Private Unions Strike Against the State's Plans to Cut Spending and Raise Taxes…  More...

03-07-2010
Our World Balances on a Sea of Debt…  More...

02-17-2010
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle…  More...

02-10-2010
European Central Bankers Poised to Take Over Europe…  More...

02-05-2010
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows…  More...

12-21-2009
ObamaCare is not about health care; it’s about control and profits.  Oddly enough, it’s not the insurance companies; it’s the central bankers…  More...

12-07-2009
How Big is a Trillion Dollars?  More...

12-02-2009
Boise Trolley Folly DOES Justify Legislative Intervention  More...

11-06-2009
Federal Reserve to Switch to New "Scratch 'N Sniff" Currency  More...

10-27-2009
New Government Health Care Plan Struggling to Find "Single Payer" Name  More...

10-26-2009
Jesus appoints Obama as "Associate Christ"  More...

09-23-2009
Has Congress become an anachronism?  More...

09-18-2009
Leftist Boise Mayor Dave Bieter in secret meetings to blow $560 million of federal welfare dollars on downtown Boise streetcar named “Desire”… or is that a streetcar named “Huge Deficit?” More...

09-8-2009
Hey, kids, got game?  Got rap?  Wanna be a rich movie star?  “That isn’t hard work,” says Obama, “and chances are you ain’t gonna be any of those things.”  More...

09-8-2009
"Obama's speech to schools:  what civics lesson will parents teach their kids?”  More...

09-1-2009
Ted Kennedy: "Lion of the Senate" or Drunken Homicide at Chappaquiddick?  More...

08-14-2009
Two Governors Bankrupt Idaho's Highways, or Who let the GARVEE bonds out?  More...

08-07-2009
"National" health care?  Stop thinking in terms of "collectives," we are individuals  More...

08-05-2009
Fed Reserve, America's legal counterfeiting ring   More...

08-05-2009
Off Balance Sheet, Out of Mind  More...

07-23-2009
National Health Care is illogical  More...

07-09-2009
The Fed Must Be Stopped  More...

06-17-2009
Idaho Congressmen introduce Federal Streetcar Revitalization Act of 2009…ask for $300 Million to build streetcars across America…$65 Million for Boise  More...

06-12-2009
Idaho Statesman supports spending $65 million of federal stimulus booty for Boise Trolley Cars  More...

05-31-2009
Idaho Statesman thinks socialist economics can enrich economy and create Idaho jobs  More...

05-05-2009
The Idaho Transportation Solution  More...

04-23-2009
B of A CEO ordered by Fed Reserve and U.S. Treasury to shut up about Merrill Lynch's billion dollar losses   More...

04-23-2009
Boise's Watergate is alive and well as Idaho's SBOE allows U of Idaho to raid private U of Idaho Foundation for $111,000 to pay for new U of I Prez   More...

04-08-2009
Failed $250 Million University Place fiasco participant, Bob Hoover, named as president of the Idaho Community Foundation  More...

03-13-2009
More Voo-Doo Economics: "Good Bank, Bad Bank"  More...

02-17-2009
The Great "Stimulus" Hoax  More...

02-13-2009
Why President Obama’s Trillion Dollar “Stimulus” Package is Unconstitutional – Part 2  More...

02-12-2009
Why President Obama’s Trillion Dollar “Stimulus” Package is Unconstitutional – Part 1  More...

02-01-2009
Petition of the Electric Light Bulb Manufacturers  More...

01-20-2009
Obama parties down at most expensive Inauguration in history -- over $170 million -- as U.S. falls further into huge Recession  More...

12-25-2008
Is The Medicine Worse Than the Illness?  More...

12-17-2008
Idaho Statesman prints insightful Reader’s View by young economist, “Don’t fall for the Big 3’s doomsday predictions – they’re unlikely”  More...

12-14-2008
Did U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald jump the gun in premature arrest of Gov. Blagojevich?  More...

12-11-2008
Idaho Statesman editors publish whitewash of Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers to save Barack Obama…
then, up pops the FBI and Illinois Gov. Blagojevich…  More...

12-07-2008
Idaho Statesman parent McClatchy confuses socialism with free market  More...

11-29-2008
Boise’s Watergate morphs into Nampa's and Caldwell's Watergate to pay for Oregon community college in Idaho  More...

11-17-2008
Victoria's Secret Reorgs as Savings & Loan Bank, Qualifies for Treasury's $700 Billion Bailout Booty  More...

11-14-2008
Stable Money Is the Key to Recovery  More...

10-31-2008
Is America on the verge of electing a socialist Islamic terrorist supporter as U.S. President?  More...

10-25-2008
U.S. bankers whine for 30 seconds, kiss Godfather Paulson’s ass, then sign off on bank nationalization  More...

10-10-2008
‘Toys R Us’ offers to bail out U.S. economy with
injection of $700 Trillion in cash from Parker Bros. Monopoly Game…
Sweetens deal by throwing in Marvin Gardens  More...

10-06-2008
Recession 2008: The blind leading the blind  More...

09-26-2008
Congressman Ron Paul's answer to President Bush's $700 Billion bailout   More...

09-24-2008
Sec of Treasury Paulson suspends U.S. Constitution, anoints himself Wizard of Oz, demands $700 billion to unclog nation’s toilets…
Will Congress assume Dying Cockroach Position?   More...

09-15-2008
Money, money everywhere, nor any drop to drink...
U.S. Dollar is pulp fiction  More...

09-11-2008
Weekend at Fannie's  More...

09-08-2008
Idaho Statesman pushes Fascist Business Model as “Vision for the Valley”  More...

09-06-2008
Look out!
Pistol Packing Mama, Gov Sarah Palin, blasts her way into the Republican National Convention...
accepts VP slot with John McCain  More...

08-29-2008
McCain chooses Idahoan Sarah Palin, a moose-hunting, fisher-babe, free market Governor of Alaska, as Vice Prez running mate on GOP ticket  More...

08-23-2008
Idaho stockpiles $500 million to $1 billion tax surplus on top of last year's $224 million surplus?  More...

08-19-2008
Washington politicians lie about true size of budget deficit  More...

08-12-2008
Corporate Welfare Alive and Well in Idaho  More...

08-01-2008
"Covered Bonds" new mortgage gimmick by "Banksta Gangsta" Treasury Sec Hank Paulson  More...

07-17-2008
History of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reveal gross corruption, fundamental flaws  More...

07-03-2008
Zimbabwe inflation hits 1,000,000% per year…
Government central bank issues new $50 Billion denomination notes as paper currency becomes worthless  More...

06-23-2008
Idaho Supreme Court enforces socialist health care law…
Taxpayers must cough up $187,000 for illegal immigrant’s heart attack  More...

06-04-2008
Obama-Clinton “nightmare ticket” promises to drag U.S. down the road to serfdom via Marxist socialism  More...

05-30-2008
Idaho Pub Ed System Run by Village Idiots?...
State Board Asks Feds to Restart Failure Clock for “No Child Left Behind” Program  More...

05-23-2008
Global Monetary Recap - 1944 to 2008  More...

05-21-2008
Kempthorne Hugs Polar Bears, Bankrupts America  More...

05-16-2008
Yeah, Kempthorne, "Cough up" those gubernatorial records, will ya?  More...

05-11-2008
Idaho:  nuclear waste dump of America  More...

04-22-2008
2008 Legislative Report Card for Idaho: F-minus More...

04-01-2008
Fed scientists discover new element in Periodic Table of Elements:  Paper  More...

03-25-2008
Gov Butch Otter signs corporate welfare Bill for $2 billion Uranium-235 enrichment plant to set Idaho up for Perfect Nuclear Storm:  a radioactive, volcanic firestorm on top of Snake Plain Aquifer's Lake Erie  More...

03-17-2008
Who Killed the U.S. Dollar?  More...

03-08-2008
Prescription for Prosperity:  A Comprehensive Economic Revitalization Plan   More...

03-13-2008 Revised
Idaho Grocery Tax Rebate to equal 9/10 of 1% of your grocery bill?... Ooooh, Whoop-tee-doo, Governor  More...

03-03-2008
Idaho Grocery Tax Rebate to equal 3/10 of 1% of your grocery bill?... Ooooh, Whoop-tee-doo, Governor  More...

02-22-2008
Idaho Legies create Perfect Storm:  yellowcake plus Yellowstone plus Snake Plain Aquifer equals radioactive Super Volcanic blast  More...

02-14-2008
Parliament of Whores admonishes one of their own  More...

02-10-2008
Anybody Seen Our Gold?  More...

02-06-2008
(Updated 02-14-2008)
GOP and Liberal Disconnected Thought Globs (DTGs) dominate 2008 presidential debates  More...

01-31-2008
Earmarks for Idaho are good but earmarks for Alaska are bad, says Idaho Statesman  More...

01-29-2008
Osama to visit Boise on Saturday  More...

01-28-2008
Smoke 'n Mirrors Economic Stimulus Package:  $600 for you, $730,000 for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac  More...

01-24-2008
The Paper Chase:  Dollar becomes pulp fiction as Fed injects trillions into the market... But Dollar is not real capital, thus cannot stimulate economy  More...

01-19-2008
Federal Reserve drives U.S. into Super Recession, then Depression, then Martial Law  More...

01-10-2008
New Thought Police Bill passes U.S. House 404-6, awaits Senate vote  More...

01-01-2008
U.S. Federal Reserve Note:  America's Pulp Fiction  More...

12-28-2007
Who shot Pakistani ex Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto?  More...

12-19-2007
Idaho Congress-crooks Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and Rep Mike Simpson rob all Americans for Idaho earmarks More...

12-18-2007
Goldman Sachs creates subprime slime with left hand, shorts subprime slime with right hand More...

12-17-2007
Ada County to operate Detox Center for drunks & dopers?  Cost to taxpayers: $1.8 million per year  More...

12-14-2007
Central Banks Conspire to Hyper-Inflate Global Economy  More...

12-11-2007
Boise's Watergate fiasco continues as Univ of Idaho plans to blow $300 million on new marketing campaign  More...

12-10-2007
Why should Boise's "Special Olympics" be funded by taxpayer earmarks and what is the true concept behind the "Special Olympics?"  More...

12-07-2007
President Bush, Sec of Treasury Paulson save America's subprime home borrowers...you bet... Just Call Hotline to Mortgage Heaven: 1-888-995-HOPE  More...

12-03-2007
U.S. Treasury to Bail Out Billionaire Bankers on Wall Street Under Guise of Saving Subprime Borrowers  More...

12-01-2007
Idaho Gov Butch Otter Holds Secret Meeting to Tax Inner Tubes on Boise River  More...

11-26-2007
Idaho's Property Tax Solution  More...

11-16-2007
The Fed's "Prime Interest Rate" Joke  More...

11-09-2007
Idaho Statesman's parent McClatchy posts $1.4 billion loss in 3rd Qtr  More...

10-29-2007
The AMT - Worst Piece of U.S. Tax Legislation  More...

10-29-2007
What is The Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit?  Hint: It's not a plastic flex straw to a bottle of Ripple wine  More...

10-17-2007
Can Idaho U.S. Senator Larry Craig be recalled?  More...

10-13-2007
How to Recall Idaho U.S. Senator Larry Craig  More...

10-10-2007
Will the real $50 please stand up?  More...

10-03-2007
President Bush and Federal Reserve bankers plan for nationwide bankruptcy with fake 3-week flu test  More...

10-01-2007
Idaho to implement ButchCare?  More...

09-25-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... The solution:  abolish fractional reserve central banking, the Federal Reserve and govt monopoly of money; allow private minting and free choice of currencies - Part 5  More...

09-20-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... The problem:  unconstitutional  Federal Reserve plays Quantitative Economics (as if econ is physics) rather than Qualitative Economics, which is based upon individual rights and freedom - Part 4  More...

09-17-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... Derivative markets now exceed half a quadrillion dollars or $500,000,000,000,000 of non-collateralized paper - Part 3  More...

09-16-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?...or, the root cause of today's monetary crisis and impending recession - Part 2  More...

09-15-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?...or, the root cause of today's monetary crisis and impending recession - Part 1  More...

09-05-2007
Boise's Toiletgate morphs into Pinocchio-gate as Senator Craig's nose mysteriously grows another 2 feet overnight  More...

09-02-2007
Senator Larry Craig did not resign and hired two lawyers, 1 for the Ethics Committee and 1 for the Minneapolis men's room debacle   More...

08-31-2007
Senator Larry Craig's abuse of power & lame excuses are symptomatic of long list of GOP political abuses in Idaho - Part 1  More...

08-23-2007
J'accusse, Mr. Federal Reserve did it with the Candlestick, the Rope, the Revolver, the Knife, the Wrench, and the Lead Pipe in the House, the Senate, the University, and Wall Street  More...

08-13-2007
Ada County Commissioners condemn own property through eminent domain...
Pay Cryptic Partners $3.2 million in fake "takings" - Part 1  More...

08-11-2007
Central bankers redefine "hyper-inflation" as "liquidity"... Inject over $326,000,000,000 into global economy to stave off stock market crash & recession  More...

08-10-2007
NY Stock Market crashes 387 points as sub-prime fiasco hits Germany, France  More...

08-09-2007
WSJ, Fox News pretend Ron Paul votes for earmarks  More...

08-08-2007
"The Fix" is still in, new community college trustees interview only 1 person for Prez... and guess what?  He got the job!  More...

07-30-2007
Harry Potter dies on page 597... in Boise  More...

07-18-2007
"The fix was in... But that's OK; This case warranted an inside job." -- Dan Popkey, Idaho Statesman  More...

07-17-2007
Is the War in Iraq a Mafia-style protection racket: U.S. military protects OPEC and OPEC promises to use only inflated petro-dollars?  More...

07-10-2007
Ex Ada County Commish Judy Peavey-Derr threatens libel lawsuit against Deep Throat II More...

07-05-2007
Idaho Senator Craig loses Illegal Immigration Amnesty bill...Does Craig support prison inmates picking Idaho crops? More...

07-03-2007
U.S. Constitution not signed by authors  More...

06-28-2007
"Bong Hits 4 Jesus"  More...

06-14-2007
Court transcripts reveal judge knows University Place fiasco was a financial scam and who the perps were More...

06-14-2007
Cheap Community College "need" is a hoax...BSU rated cheapest university in the nation by US News & World Report More...

06-13-2007
Ada County screws taxpayers, again...pays Cryptic Partners $1.4 million for $900,000 office space in Eminent Domain settlement  More...

06-08-2007
NO campaign thanks YES campaign for abuse of Absentee Ballots, encourages re-vote by mail  More...

06-07-2007
Scientists slap Bible Bangers' definition of "when does life begin" upside their diploid totipotent cells  More...

06-06-2007
What is America's greatest moral challenge?  More...

05-29-2007
Yo, Rudy, follow the money  More...

05-26-2007
What is paper money? More...

05-02-2007
Sec of Interior Kempthorne offers quid pro quo worth billions of dollars to Louisiana Sen Mary Landrieu  More...

04-19-2007
Supreme Court takes giant step backwards  More...

04-06-2007
House Speaker Pelosi violates U.S. Constitution and Logan Act, commits felony by impersonating Sec of State Condoleezza Rice on trip to Middle East  More...

03-28-2007
Education math scores drop across the state as Idaho teachers, administrators, and coaches vacation to Ireland and China on your tax dollars  More...

03-25-2007
Idaho GOP Legies add $400 million pork to Demo's Iraq War Bill  More...

03-23-2007
Idaho taxpayers subsidize new Micron plant in China  More...

03-19-2007
Ex Gov Kempthorne's original $3 billion Highway Plan exceeds $6 billion... Idaho Statesman says, "Pass the budget, no strings attached"  More...

03-14-2007
Low carb diet kicks government's low fat guidelines in its big fat butt  More...

03-09-2007
The paper chase... Interest rate arbitrage between the Yen and the Dollar  More...

03-08-2007
Bullet train from Boise to Meridian derailed as billion dollar local option sales tax bites the dust...poof  More...

03-01-2007
Stock market plunges 416 points in one day   More...

02-26-2007
"An Inconvenient Truth" morphs into "Convenient Lies" as Hollywood Oscars regurgitate 30-year old Doomsday baloney from the 1970s  More...

02-23-2007
Judge cries at Anna Nicole Smith hearing...wins Oscars for Best Actor, Worst Director  More...

02-22-2007
World Wide Monetary Inflation...the not-so-Good, the Bad, and the Ugly  More...

02-18-2007
Boise's Watergate morphs into Librarygate as Urban Renewal Agency picks Bodo developer for unconstitutionally-funded $130 million "Library Blocks" project  More...

02-16-2007
CAMBR fraud at U of  Idaho?  More...

02-11-2007
Who's Your Favorite Socialist Candidate for the 2008 Presidency?  More...

02-09-2007
Oink-Oink, Boise City Council Feeds at State & Federal Pig Troughs  More...

02-08-2007
Big Brother mandates vaccine for 11-year old girls  More...

01-31-2007
Ada County Commissioners condemn new Ada County Courthouse, then use Eminent Domain to confiscate their own property... huh?  More...

01-22-2007
Where in Hell did Our 3 Branches of Government Go?  More...

01-18-2007
The Real Purpose of the Federal Reserve  More...

01-17-2007
European Union Dumps German, Officially Adopts English as Universal Language  More...

01-15-2007
GOP "Intellectuals" Propose Socialist Job Corps Program to Rebuild Iraq  More...

01-08-2007
Kempthorne Plays "Polar Bear Politics"  More...

01-02-2007
Boise State outsmarts Oklahoma with Statue of Liberty fake pass, Wins Fiesta Bowl 43-42 in nail-biting overtime  More...

12-30-2006
Saddam Hussein
1937-2006  More...

12-29-2006
Shell Oil hires ex Sec of Interior Gale Norton...Conflict of interest?  More...

12-26-2006
"Black box" trading on the Big Board...is it legal... is it moral?
Part 2  More...

12-19-2006
"Black box" trading on the Big Board...is it legal... is it moral?
Part 1  More...

11-30-2006
U of I Wallace pleads guilty to state criminal charges in $136 million University Place fiasco...no fine and 3-year probation  More...

11-19-2006
If Idaho "needs" more nurses, let supply and demand in the free market automatically solve the "problem"  More...

11-17-2006
Boise "needs" a detox center like it "needs" another snort of crack  More...

11-17-2006
If Boise's "Library Blocks" project is unconstitutional, then why isn't the Courthouse project unconstitutional?  More...

11-10-2006
The Demos are coming, the Demos are coming, so now what?  More...

11-01-2006
Bag Boy Wallace Charged with Felony in U of Idaho Crime Spree...Major Perps Skate Free?  More...

10-27-2006
2006 Nobel Economist praises "Dynamic Capitalism" by assuming socialist principles  More...

10-20-2006
Voters, not the Idaho Transportation Board, must approve billion dollar highway expenditures for "Connecting Idaho"  More...

10-17-2006
Wall Street Journal physics readers argue Big Bang Theory  More...

10-06-2006
Prop 1: Idaho Teachers' union earmarks 1% of sales tax for itself  More...

09-27-2006
Anti-gay marriage amendment unconstitutional  More...

08-31-2006
Does University Place's secret civil settlement constitute "burying of public info?"  More...

08-30-2006
WSJ thinks function of Fed Reserve is "maintaining an overall stable price level"  More...

08-25-2006
Idaho leads world in "Fat Pill" production  More...

08-19-2006
Are Idaho's "Rainy Day Funds" unconstitutional?  More...

08-18-2006
Federalist Papers do not grant warrant-less searches or carte blanche wire tapping to President  More...

08-14-2006
Bodo developer proposes Boise's Watergate method to rip down, rebuild Boise main library  More...

08-07-2006
Idaho Baptists launch missiles against California Catholics?  More...

07-18-2006
Boise needs a Drug Czar like it needs a Snicker-doodle Czar  More...

07-17-2006
Billionaires Waren Buffet and Bill Gates fall ill to socialist philosophy  More...

05-31-2006
Grand Inquisitor visits Auschwitz  More...

05-22-2006
U.S. Treasury issues new Scratch N Sniff currency  More...

05-12-2006
10 Reasons why Idaho Governor Kempthorne should NOT be confirmed as Secretary of the Interior  More...

05-08-2006
Is it simply La Cage aux Folles at the Kempthorne Confirmation Hearing or will somebody ask a real question?  More...

04-24-2006
U.S. Constitution declared unconstitutional...
not signed by its authors, or anybody else  More...

04-17-2006
Idaho Teachers' union pushes Initiative for  Guaranteed Annual Income by earmarking 1% of sales tax for itself  More...

04-10-2006
University Place perps agree to not sue themselves...Pay each other $8.3 million...Cryptic Partners remains as possible 'fall guy' - Part II More...

04-03-2006
University Place perps agree to not sue themselves...Pay each other $8.3 million...Cryptic Partners remains as possible 'fall guy' - Part I More...

03-27-2006
JFAC gives blank check for Governor Kempthorne's Highway Robbery  More...

03-20-2006
Boise's Watergate goes to Washington... Governor Kempthorne nominated as Secretary of Interior  More...

03-06-2006
Is Idaho's $3 Billion GARVEE Highway Debt Unconstitutional?  More...

02-20-2006
Why Idaho's Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment is Pretended Law...Part II  More...

02-13-2006
Why Idaho's Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment is Pretended Law...Part I  More...

02-06-2006
Why we don't need property taxes...Part II  More...

01-30-2006
Why we don't need property taxes...Part I  More...

01-09-2006
Santa 'Clause' shows up to save Florida's Teachers' Union  More...

09-19-2005
Did Japanese mafia steer Hurricane Katrina down Bourbon Street for fun and profit...or revenge?  More...

09-12-2005
Why we don't need FEMA or Boise's "Blueprint for Good Growth"  More...

09-05-2005
Should Idaho abolish property taxes and implement a flat sales tax?  More...

08-22-2005
Gov Kempthorne is not our "CEO"  More...

07-11-2005
Ethnomathematics  More...

06-20-2005
Fat Idaho  More...

04-18-2005
The Fuzzy Math of U.S. Coinage  More...

04-11-2005
Birth:  Nature's Transfer of Private Property Rights  More...

03-14-2005
Whose Collective Rights?  More...

02-28-2005
Is Micron Whining for Corporate Welfare or Demanding Free Market Capitalism?  More...

02-21-2005
Catholicism in Latin America Morphs into Socialism  More...

01-31-2005
Oil Companies Turn Earth into Giant CO2 Soda Pop Bottles  More...

01-24-2005
Idaho Legislature Repeals Itself? ...
Anti-gay Marriage:  The State vs. The Individual  More...

01-17-2005
Idaho's Looming Fake Health Care "Crisis" More...

10-25-2004
America's Intellectual Hierarchy More...

09-27-2004
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
A panda walks into a café.  He orders a sandwich, eats it, then pulls out a gun and blasts two shots into the ceiling.   More...

10-11-2004
Anti-gay Marriage:  The State vs. The Individual  More...

10-04-2004
Evolution Of Math Instruction In California Public Schools  More...

Why Johnny Can't Read  More...

Does surgery for cancer cause more cancer?   More...

When Good Cells Go Bad (cancer:  who's right: viral theory or trophoblast theory?)  More...

Health Care Is Not A Right  More...

Must see movie out on DVD:

"V" for Vendetta...
"The people should not be afraid of their government; Governments should be afraid of their people."

   “Who are you?”

   “Who?  Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.”

   “Well, I can see that.”

   “Of course you can.  I’m not questioning your powers of observation.  I’m merely remarking on the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.”

   “Oh, right.”

   “But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the most commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this most dramatis personae:

   Voila!  In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate.

   This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished.  However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

    The only verdict is vengeance, a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.”

    Did You Know...?   

   The Ten Commandments contain 297 words.  The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words.  Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words.  A recent federal directive regulating the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.

   Amendment X to the Constitution of the United States, together with Article I, Section 8, prohibits the U.S. Congress from involving itself in cabbage pricing, education, health care, personal safety, campaign financing, most criminal law, toilet capacity, the banning of amino acid supplements (such as tryptophan), vitamins (such as B-17) and thousands of other things it has gotten away with so far.

       Quickie News Briefs     

Friday January 27, 2012

--  Thur Jan 26  The problem with Economic Village Idiots like President Barack Obama is not with him.  There have always been intellectually stupid politicians of the state collectivist ilk who have run for office and won.  Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, Adolph Hitler, national socialist dictator of Germany, Fidel Castro, communist dictator of Cuba, the list is long.  No, girl friends, it is not the fault of the dictators that they keep getting elected.  It is the fault of the people, the intellectual level of the culture who voted for them, that is the real problem.  Obama, like Mussolini, Hitler, and Lenin didn't just pop up out of nowhere and take over a country.  The people handed it to each of them on a silver platter.  True, it is easier to predict that somebody will become a dictator AFTER they have exterminated thousands or millions of their countrymen in gas chambers and firing squads and US President Barack Obama has just begun on his dictatorial journey with all of his socialist policies.  The problem is that too many people are incapable of EXTRAPOLATING the end results of socialist, communist, fascist, and other state collectivist policies.  The real problem with people not being able to logically reason and thus forecast that socialist policies must necessarily end up as either stagnant economies that go nowhere or, in worst case scenarios, a gas chamber, is that AFTER THE FACT is waaaay too late.  All of the "I told you so's," and, "Gee whizzers, I didn't know he was really using gas chambers," after WW II were way too late.  If the President of the United States is not advocating inherent individual rights, private property rights, the return to a limited federal Republic under the rule of law instead of the rule of man, you should be very afraid.  Why?  Because that means he is advocating a dictatorial position for himself and a subservient position for you.  Note in the President's State of the Union speech the other night that he is asking Congress to grant him the authority to consolidate essentially all of the federal bureaucracies under his Executive Branch rule so he can act more rapidly.  This is indicative of his aspirations to become a state collectivist dictator, just like Mussolini started out, just like Hitler started out, just like Lenin started out, and we all know what happened in the End Game of those regimes.  Consolidating federal control in the Executive Branch of government is the exact anti-thesis of how and why the US Constitution was formulated.  You don't even have to pore over the Federalist Papers to figure this out.  Government is supposed to be LIMITED and SLOW on purpose.  That's OK since government is not supposed to be so big and so all encompassing.  This is not a flaw in a constitutional republic whose foundations are based upon inalienable inherent rights of the people obtained from Nature or God.  The reason that all dictators hate limited Republics is because it impedes the implementation of their dictatorship.  Make no mistake about it:  President Barack Obama's "good intentions" for you consist of making you a ward of His Socialist Welfare State.  First he must obtain the sanction of his victims, you.  He did that in 2008.  Next, he must make you feel guilty if you don't acquiesce to his ideas of economic sophistry.  Welcome to ObamaCare.  The only way you can stop him now is by voting his butt out in 2012.  It is not Obama that I am worried about.  It's the current culture of altruistic collectivism that has taken over our entire nationalized public education system that is frightening.  Because it has produced people who can't think, never mind don't think.  Students have not been taught how to think in categories of step by step logic using reason.  Instead they have been taught to think in terms of disconnected illogical thought globs.  The government school system has rendered an entire generation of youth intellectually impotent.  That is what one needs to be worried about, not Obama the socialist dictator.  He's just another actor on the stage, reading socialist claptrap from a Hollywood teleprompter.  If Americans don't wake up, they may soon learn how socialist ideas are empirically transformed into socialist Holocausts in the End Game with people screaming, "Holy crap, I sure didn't see that coming!"  No shit, little Beaver.  One who does not think in clearly defined terms will literally not "see" any of it coming.  If you didn't "see" what Obama really wants in between the lines of his State of His Fascist Union speech last Tuesday night, you really don't "see" it coming, do you?  Don't wait until the government monitors your emails, tattoos a number on your arm, makes you post a Star on your shop window, herds you into a ghetto (many blacks are already there, lured by ADC and food stamp programs), and finally, while you're taking off your clothes in the government's fake shower, do you then finally "see" it coming.

--  Tue Jan 24  President Obamarama will be babbling His State of the Union Address on all the standard TV Comedy channels tonight:  MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOXy LOXy, Public Whatever, and the Disney Channel.  His Head Socialist spokesbabe at the OO (Oval Office), Valerie Jarrett, says Barack-a-roonie will cover four important areas in his Statist of the Union Address:  (1) How to Pump Oil From Venezuelan Friend Hugo Chavez's Nationalized Oil Fields to Gas Stations in Washington DC, (2) How to Set All the Prices For 2 Trillion Commodities & Services Throughout America, (3) How Everybody Should Pull and Work Hard Together for the Common Good, and (4) How About That 20% Unemployment Rate, America, Pretty Cool, Huh?  So, if you have nothing better to do, tune in and listen to Professor Obla-dee-Obla-dah read his Hollywood teleprompter script and wow you with his version of How I Hoped and Changed America from a Limited Free Market to an Extremely Limited Socialist Paradise Closely Resembling George Orwell's New Speak Novel:  1984.  "Yea," says President Obama.  "We are now the pigs in the farmhouse!"  Yahoo and yippee.  "Don't listen to what we say," said Valerie Jarrett.  "Just watch what we do."  Since when did the President of the United States presume that he was the CEO of America, dishing out your inherent rights -- huh? Whose inherent rights? -- and confiscating your private property through inflation while trying to manage the entire US economy?  Oh, now I remember.  Since FDR, right?  Yeah, FDR.  And we all know how well that worked out.  Nothing.  A big fat zero.  Well, not exactly.  He dragged us kicking and screaming into the central bankers' WW II so they could continue financing both sides of the War for a coupla more years.  That was fun.  Unless you got shot on the Maginot Line or bought it on the beach at Normandy.  Today you get to pay for Bush's and Obama's Wars in the Middle East... you know, for the Petro Dollar and the OPEC monopoly oil ministers.  Yeah, the famous Petro Dollar Agreement which is breaking down real fast, girl friends.  Russia and China are now using their own currencies to buy and sell oil with the Dish Towels of the Shifting Sands & Allegiances of the Sahara.  And Barack Obla-Humpty-Dumpty stuck his finger in the oil pipeline running from Canada to the Gulf of Mehico.  No oil coming through here, folks.  But let's all work together to set oil prices, increase government jobs so we can pretend we increased employment in America, and, hey, I have nothing but "good intentions" for everybody in the US, says Mr. Work-For-Me-or-It's-Your-Ass Economic Dictator Obama.  It's a really sad day in America when the President of the United States thinks it's his job to lay out your government ordained position in His Global Economic Battleground and discuss it on national TV as His State of the Union Address.  All based upon The President's really, really "good intentions," to be sure.  In between His playing another 19 rounds of golf in Hawaii where he wasn't born...  Maybe he should play golf in Kenya?

--  Fri Jan 20  Whoa, girl friends, T-Bills are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government?  Wowie-zowie, except for one thing.  T-Bills are now selling for negative interest rates.  That's right, Martha.  The latest $10 billion auction in US inflation-adjustable T-Bills called TIPS incur a 0.046% interest rate cost to YOU, the buyer.  You could still possibly make money because the principal in TIPS bonds could increase as inflation increases.  So now the US government is selling adjustable rate T-Bills, charging you a fee, because the Feds know that they are going to continue hyper-inflating our money supply.  Things have really gotten out of hand in the financial community these days.  What's next?  Maybe the local bank will start charging you a fee for depositing your savings into a CD by promising to increase your principal by some inflation rate formula.  Then you have to pray that inflation continues so you can beat the negative interest rate they're charging you to open up a savings account or CD.  What a joke.

--  Thur Jan 19  President Barack Obama said "no" to the issuing of a permit to build an oil pipeline from Canada across the US to Mexico.  The Greenies who think they are protecting the environment cheered.  So did the EPA.  The oil companies and pipeline workers booed.  Of course, there are better cleaner sources of infinite energy that we could tap from the "vacuum" of the space time continuum -- see www.energenx.com  or www.r-charge.com -- but the real question here is:  why in hell do we have to ask the President of the United States whether we can build an oil pipeline?  Better yet, how in hell did the President of the United States presume the position of Economic Dictator of America?  Of course, oil companies can't just run amuck building anything they want across any state in the Union but shouldn't that be a decision for local state governments and their residents, not the President of the US?  Nobody has questioned the President's authority, but they should.  From where did Obama obtain his new Economic Authority?  Everybody presumes the President is the CEO of America, so they only argue about The CEO's illegal decision of "yes" or "no," not whether he has the authority to issue or withhold economic permits.  The US has now devolved from a limited Republic with free market capitalism and the rule of law to the level of a 1930's fascist Italy during which IL Deuce, Mussolini, dictated the price of every service and commodity in that nation.  And then along came Adolph, who did the same thing in Germany.  And the USSR.  And China.  And..., hey, welcome to the New United States of America where whoever happens to be the head honcho of the current biggest tribal collective, rules the land.  The pipeline issue is not about the environment.  It is about philosophy.  It is about the philosophical difference between the rule of law vs. the rule of man.  The rule of law is gone, along with your inherent individual freedom and private property rights.  Welcome to the rule of the Collective, the Mob, the Borg.

--  Tue Jan 17  The GOP presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last night fell to a new low when Rep Ron Paul tried to explain why the US should stop its continual warmongering all across the globe and virtually none of the other GOP candidates or audience understood what he was talking about.  In fact, they boo-ed him.  Nobody is asking the right question, which is, Who initiated the use of force and fraud in the Middle East that has now resulted in (1) the hatred of America by Third World nations in general, (2) the bombings of our embassies throughout the world and the two World Trade Centers in New York, and (3) the continual undeclared wars going on in the Middle East?  The answer is that it was the central bankers of America and the OPEC oil cartel who set up the Petro Dollar Deal in which (1) the OPEC oil ministers would get a monopoly on selling oil in the world, (2) the OPEC oil ministers can only sell oil in dollars -- no other currencies, hence the term "Petro Dollar", and (3) the United States Federal Reserve in league with other global central bankers would use the US military to protect this God awful PETRO  DOLLAR deal.  That is what Rep Ron Paul is talking about when he says that we, the United States, through a GSE (The Federal Reserve) and the illegal use of our military power to "protect" the Petro Dollar OPEC monopoly (Congress has not declared war upon any nation in the Middle East) are guilty of initiating the use of both force and fraud in this 50-75 year Middle East debacle.  But since most Americans have not been told the truth, they only look at the partial results of our actions -- the bombings of the two World Trade Centers in New York.  They then conclude that US-Middle East history and foreign affairs started on 9/11/2001 and that the US is only responding in self defense -- what I would call a faux self defense -- by bombing the crap out of various peoples in the Middle East as retribution for the 3,000 Trade Center deaths in New York.  The Trade Center airplane crash bombings were a response by the OPEC ministers' rich children, 17 disgruntled Saudi Arabian rich kids whose Daddies ARE the House of Saud.  The US has been FOR Osama bin Laden and then AGAINST him for many years.  Remember, the US supplied Osama bin Laden with most of his military equipment as we openly supported him and his motley crew in fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  Talk about short-sighted and revisionist history on the part of all the US war hawks running for the 2012 US presidency.  They either pretend, or fail to see, how the US central bankers started this entire debacle with their Petrol Dollar Deal with OPEC.  Rep Ron Paul is telling the truth and -- like others before him in the world of moral philosophy -- will probably lose his bid for the presidency of the United States because ignorant Americans have fallen for the same central banking cartel fairytale about who initiated the wars in the Middle East and who initiated the hyperinflation and continual debasement of our currency at home:  the central bankers.  Note how each of the candidates other than Rep Ron Paul vociferously played to the Myrtle Beach audience as they howled like wolves to, "Kill, kill, kill" undefined terrorists in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.  And, by the way, whatever happened to that CIA whistle blower who recently wrote a book claiming we did not need to declare war on Iraq because they had already offered to end any "problems" there, and further, that she -- the CIA lady -- had information that the US secret service (or somebody like them) helped the World Trade Centers come crashing down with a clever placement of explosives at key points on the building?  She went to jail for year for her revelations but the question is:  where is she now and where is her book?  Back to the scene of the S.C. presidential debates.  Every GOP candidate is out for war, even though Rep Ron Paul clearly explained the difference between his views of creating a strong pro-defense policy vs. blowing trillions of dollars every year on the central bankers backing of the Military Industrial Complex.  Once again, it is the low level of intellectual understanding of the other presidential candidates (and the audience) about concepts such as "real money" and "true free market economics" that distinguishes the difference between candidate Ron Paul and the rest of the howling GOP pack.  It seems we have turned into a nation of Spartans, ready to conquer the entire world based upon false premises and half truths.

--  Mon Jan 16  "Could a volcano heat your home?" asks AP journalist Jeff Barnard on the front page of this weekend's Idaho Statesman newspaper.  A better question would be, "Could stupid scientists injecting millions of gallons of water into a volcano in Oregon blow up the entire Earth?"  The process is called EGS, or Enhanced Geothermal Systems, and it is an attempt to pour cold water over a mile deep into the Earth onto the rocks near a volcano in order to fracture the rocks ("fracking"), allowing water to create fissures, heating up the water from the hot volcano, turning it into steam, and escaping back up to the surface of the earth to run turbines and thus produce electricity.  While this might be OK for existing geothermal springs already created by Mother Nature, it is quite another thing to purposely "frack" lava tubes or granite in order to create an underground steam engine.  Fracking in this manner has caused so many earthquakes in other parts of the planet, such as Basel, Switzerland, and Australia, France, Germany, and the US that Switzerland, for one, shut down their EGS in 2009 and other nations are taking another look at this method to produce energy.  Unfortunately, the US Dept of Energy and private investors -- including Google -- have ponied up some $43 million to test a pilot EGS project 20 miles south of Bend, Oregon.  Tests are also going on in other states such as Idaho near the Idaho National Laboratory -- a really stupid idea since the Snake Plain Aquifer (size of Lake Erie) sits on top of the Yellowstone volcanic caldera, one of the largest in the world.  Instead of reiterating why this is a bad idea, please read the following FM Duck article about the pouring of sea water into the BP oil drillings that go many miles under the sea above existing volcanoes in the Gulf of Mexico.  More importantly, read what some scientists have pieced together about how the Asteroid Belt was formed some 75,000 years ago:  namely, the routing of a sea or lake into a volcano that caused one of the previous planets in our solar system, called Phaeton or Malona, to explode and thus create what we now call the Asteroid Belt.  Shall we try for two asteroid belts in our solar system, by pulling the same stunt on planet Earth?  Should we take the chance?  What's the ROI, the risk/reward, for this political stunt?  Especially when we have other non-risky forms of cheap renewable energy.  The Swiss wised up after recording some 13,000 induced earthquakes near Basel from their EGS tests.  Will the US wise up in time?  Maybe not if the politicians run the show.  Good luck planet Earth, second Asteroid Belt from the Sun.

07-09-2010
Energy - Part 2 of 3
The Asteroid Belt and How It Got there After the Planet Phaeton Blew up... Will History Repeat itself?…  More...

--  Thur Jan 12  Student Loan Bubble on the horizon?  The Federal Reserve not only funded the crash and burn housing bubble with fake Monopoly Money, and the War in the Middle East with pulp fiction dollars, they now have their central banking hooks into your children.  That's right, girl friends.  US college students are now on the hook for over $750 Billion -- that's with a capital 'B' -- to member banks of the Federal Reserve which has now, through Obama government edict, consolidated all student loans through not Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac but through their GSE cousin:  Sallie Mae.  Dontcha just love all those Gubbament Macs and Maes?  750 Billion Big Ones!  That's larger than the entire US consumer credit card debt.  Yahoo!  That's larger than one year's worth of wasted military spending in the Middle East.  Hey, first the Fed inflates the money supply, then they have to find a way to shovel the pulp fiction dollars out the door to the consumer so they can make the interest on the loans.  Houses are done, the military is winding down, so now what?  How can the Fed make big interest today?  Oh, I know how... we hook the kids by convincing them and their parents that they need a state/federal work permit -- a college degree -- and jack up the rates for college by the sheer act of hyper-inflating the money supply.  Then we, the Fed, loan the little suckers $20K to $50K per year to get their little state work permits.  Plus interest.  Wowie Zowie!  Question:  is a college degree really necessary?  Not at the current ROI of $50K to $200K, especially if your major is, like, history, or archeology, or basket weaving for Lower Slobovia.  Read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and wise up suckers.  Maybe you shouldn't go to college.  Attending seminars as you need them and self employment are better options for many young people than blowing $200,000 for a useless piece of paper from GotBigDebt U.  "Five years of schooling and they put you on the day shift..." 

--  Thur Jan 12  The IRS sent my 1040 tax form back again.  Probably because my response to the question, "List all dependents" was:
12 million illegal immigrants
3 million crack heads
42 million unemployable people on food stamps
2 million people in over 243 prisons
half of Mexico
535 fools in the US Congress, and
1 Bozo of a Clown in the White House

--  Thur Jan 12  Whoa, girl friends, pull up the barn floor, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, and listen up.  Video proof exists that dead people are allowed to vote in the New Hampshire primary.  How?  Video footage provided exclusively to The Daily Caller shows election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters at multiple voting precincts during the state’s primary election on Tuesday.  The bombshell video is the work of conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas.  Voters in the Granite State are not required to present identification to vote. O’Keefe’s investigators were able to obtain ballots under the names of dead voters at polling locations Tuesday by simply asking for them, he said.  “Live free or die,” an election worker told one of the investigators in the video. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”

--  Sun Jan 08  Lest you think America could never reach the hyper-inflation absurdities of Germany's Weimar Republic, you are witnessing this process right now as it unfolds in Washington, DC.

Economic History Lesson 101A, Weimar Republic, Germany, 1920s  In 1914, Germany’s Fed Reserve, the Reichsbank, suspended conversion of its paper money into gold.  By November 1923, after continual “injections of liquidity,” Reich Marks in circulation soared past 92.8 quintillion Marks and skyrocketed past 496 quintillion Marks through July of 1924.  On Oct 25, 1923, the Reichsbank apologized that it had been able to only print 120 quadrillion Marks that day, but the demand was for one quintillion Marks.  Finally, after nobody would accept the Mark, the Reichsbank devalued to a new Rentenmark convertible at 1 trillion to one.  By Nov 1923, circulation had increased 245 billion times and prices 1,380 billion times.  Inflation finally stopped in one day when 4.2 Rentenmarks (4.2 trillion old Marks) exchanged for 1 Dollar, which was convertible into gold.  Germany, via the Dollar, finally went back to the gold standard, after destroying its entire economy in 9 years through hyperinflation of its non-backed paper money. – Dr. H. Hazlitt, Economist

Sound familiar?

Today, in 2012, after FDR dumped the gold standard in 1933 and Nixon cut all dollar ties to gold in 1971, our derivative markets currently exceed a half a quadrillion dollars or $680,000,000,000,000 – six hundred trillion dollars – of non-collateralized paper fueled by America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.  And what is it that everybody is screaming for more of?  The injection of trillions and trillions of more non-collateralized paper money as “liquidity” to “spur” the “growth” of the economy.

--  Sun Jan 08  The following history of how many paper dollars it takes to equal one troy oz of gold clearly shows what the Federal Reserve bankers and US politicians have been doing to our currency.  Feast your eyeballs on the following forty years of dollar depreciation, inflation, and transference of the fruits of your labors to those in power:

Date          Gold Price/oz

Aug 1971     $     35
Aug 1972     $     38
May 1973     $     42
Jan  1980     $   850
Aug 1999     $   252
Oct  1999     $   338
Jan  2004     $   400
Nov  2005     $   500
Apr  2006     $   600
May  2006    $   730
Jun  2006     $   540
Nov  2007     $   845
Jan  2008     $   850
Mar  2008     $ 1,030
Dec  2009     $ 1,200
May  2010     $ 1,230
Jun  2010     $ 1,265
Sep  2010     $ 1,300
Oct  2010      $ 1,360
Nov  2010     $ 1,400
Dec  2010     $ 1,425
Mar  2011     $ 1,447
Apr  2011     $ 1,476
May 2011     $ 1,569
Jul   2011     $ 1,600
Aug  2011     $1,918
Sep  2011     $ 1,700
Oct   2011     $ 1,600
Nov  2011      $ 1,740
Dec  2011      $ 1,635

Silver:  2010  $18 per troy oz.
           2011  $32 per troy oz.

--  Sun Jan 08  Listen up girl friends.  Think the real estate market is picking up for the better?  Think again.  The US real estate market is about to be hit by another surge of bank repossessions, according to a new report from the online foreclosure sale site RealtyTrac.  As banks resubmit millions of documents and courts begin hearing cases again, the backlog of over four million delinquent loans will start surging through the pipeline again.  "November’s numbers suggest a new set of incoming foreclosure waves, many of which may roll into the market as REOs [bank repossessions] or short sales sometime early next year,” said James Saccacio, co-founder of RealtyTrac. “...some states such as California, Arizona and Massachusetts actually posted year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity in November."  Here's the real issue:  what do we mean when we say the real estate market should "pick up?"  Why would we want housing prices to go back up to their hyper-inflated prices of 2006, the root cause of which was the Federal Reserve inflating the money supply and releasing said pulp fiction dollars into the market via Fannie and Freddie?  It's not housing prices that should go back up.  They should continue down down down, along with the rest of the prices of commodities and services in the market.  (True free market prices tend toward zero; government interventionist prices tend toward infinity.)  But, besides housing, the rest of the commodity and service prices in the market were also jacked up by the inflationary debt practices of the central bankers and unbridled government expenditures.  We are now in debt to the tune of over $15 trillion dollars.  And the US long term debt for unsecured future spending is more like $60 trillion to over $100 trillion dollars (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security).  Total outstanding world debt -- all unsecured debt -- for the US dollar is somewhere around $400 to $600 trillion dollars.  That's half a quadrillion dollars that the Federal Reserve bankers have put into motion -- in one way or another -- so far.  Here's the key to understanding the scheme of central banking robbery:  (1) create principal out of thin air, and (2) earn interest by "loaning" that principal out to various nations.  It's called a National Debt.  The central bankers don't really care about being repaid their fake principal since it was made up out of thin air anyway.  It's the interest they are after, not the principal.  The principal was just the "substrate" used to get to your money to receive the interest.  Keynesian Economics gobble-dee-gook and Double Speak from government Phd "economists" camouflage this whole process, pretending to legitimize it at all institutions of higher learning so they can foist it upon the unsuspecting public.  Anybody who reveals or criticizes this central banking Ponzi scheme is characterized as a "conspiracy theorist" and roundly laughed at by the drive-by media who have no clue about what's really going on with our pulp fiction dollars.

--  Jan 07  According to journalist Szu Ping Chan at The Telegraph in London, Eurozone bank shares were battered for a second day.

  "The scale of the problems facing the eurozone banking system were highlighted on Wednesday as shares in Italian financial group UniCredit crashed with the launch of a deeply-discounted €7.5bn (£6.2bn) cash call.

  After falling 15pc on Wednesday, shares were down 12pc in mid-afternoon trade at €4.766, after being suspended at least twice amid volatile trade.  Italian bank shares filled eight of the top ten fallers in the FTSE Mib index in Milan, with Banco Popolare falling 8.3pc and Intesa Sanpaolo down 5.7pc. The index as a whole fell 3.2pc to 14,837.59.

  French and German banks also led the fallers in their respective indices. Société Générale fell 3.2pc, while Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank in Germany both fell 3.9pc."

What significance does this portend for Americans?  The financial crashes in Europe will soon become financial crashes in the US since everybody is tied into the same monetary umbilical cord -- or should I say hangman's indebtedness noose?

-- Jan 07  Pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, and listen up, girl friends.  From journalist Louise Armiststead at London's The Telegraph:

"Hungary faces crisis as traders fear bond debt default

Hungary was forced to cancel a bond swap auction amid an escalating financial and political crisis that investors fear could trigger another dangerous shockwave in Europe.

The Budapest government saw borrowing costs soar and the currency plunge as traders bet that international authorities may abandon Hungary, letting it become the first European Union country to default on its debts.

The florint fell more than 1pc to a record low against the euro and bond yields soared over 10pc. The Hungarian government, which has defied Brussels by introducing a raft of radical constitutional reforms, called off its plans to swap old debt for new because it would be too expensive.

Traders, already rattled by the advancing eurozone debt crisis, including a drastically discounted rights issue by UniCredit, were unnerved by the emergence of a new front in central Europe. France's CAC index fell 1.6pc, while Germany's Dax and the FTSE 100 dropped 0.6pc each."

From US President Barack Obama, "Yes, my fellow Americans" -- lying through his teeth -- "everything looking OK over here, gang, employment is up and there's a chicken in every pot, uh-huh, you betchum.  Print up more money.  Yahoo and a yippee kai yeaaa."

--  Jan 07  The Idaho GOP threw a shindig at the Riverside Hotel last evening, hosting its first ever straw poll -- cost you $30 bucks a head to vote -- for their favorite GOP US presidential candidate.  And the winner was:  Texas Rep. Ron Paul with 175 votes, Obama-Lite candidate Mitt Romney with 137 votes, Gingrich and Santorum both popped up with 40 some-odd votes each, and the rest totaled about 10 votes for the bartender because he mixes up a good Margarita.  Last night's straw poll is just a precursor to the Idaho GOP presidential primary, which -- also for the first time ever -- will play out as a caucus (much like Iowa only much much bigger, as in the largest caucus in the US) on March 6, 2012, at Boise State's Taco Bell Arena.  Not on the blue turf, dummies.  Indoors where they play basketball.  March 6 is Super Tuesday, on which day about 20 states in the Union will also hold their primaries.  A caucus-style primary is brand spanking new for the Idaho GOP -- although not for Idaho's left Liberal Progressive, Fascist, Socialist, Communists, all two or three of whom hold their Democratic caucus down at Joe's Bar & Grill in Boise's North End, the looks of which rhymes with Berzerkeley, California.  Back to the GOP caucus.  All Republicans who think they are registered as GOP party members are probably not.  Unless you just re-registered yesterday, you need to haul your little derriere down to your local county recorder's office and sign up again.  New law.  You must re-register.  If you are really a lazy butt sloth -- like from the LAZEE-BAR-Ranch where they hire sheepy-looking resort dogs to herd their cattle to the Clubhouse & Pool to be branded by urban cowboys in between slurps of tall mint juleps  -- then you can register at the door on March 6 at the Taco Bell Arena before jamming inside with about 15,000 other expected GOP faithfuls.  I would encourage you to vote for Ron Paul.  I know, I know.  You think Ron Paul's national defense policy includes allowing the Mullahs of Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.  Buzz, not true.  Rep Paul's national defense policy would be more along the lines of former President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars or similar project.  While he does not believe in America trying to police the entire world, he is not a pacifist by any means.  His motto:  lead by example.  Free trade.  Exemplify the Bill of Rights.  Stop the US from participating in all the illegal wars around the globe that have not be declared by the US Congress and are, therefore, illegal.  But if somebody attacks the US, there will be hell to pay as we defend ourselves from other's initiated aggression.  That, much like Presidential Reagan's stance, is the stance of Rep Ron Paul.  Don't confuse Ron Paul's Libertarian theoretical discussions about who has the inherent right to create whatever weapons they feel they need with a pacifist attitude.  Once again, a pacifist he is not.  And he is the only presidential candidate who understands that the root cause of our -- and the globe's -- financial indebtedness and total financial mess is due directly to the actions of all the central banks in the world.  That, mes amies, is probably the key reason you should vote for him.  If the Bad Guys can't print the money, the politicians and war hawks can't create either the welfare or the warfare state.  The bankers need the sanction of their victims, that would be you, and Ron Paul fully understands that, plus how to change it for the good.  The 2012 Elections are probably the most important elections that will be held in over a century.  Be there.  Stop Obama and the central bankers.  Let's return to sound money, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments, and The Golden Rule.  What more do we need?  The rest of the universe is waiting for us to wake up and catch up before we blow ourselves to smitherines.

--  Jan 07  Welcome to the Ponzi Planet:  Earth.  A Ponzi scheme is a con game in which the con artist continually pays off current suckers with new money from the latest suckers, until he runs out of suckers and then the game is up.  That is exactly what the central banks in all the governments on planet Earth are currently doing:  continually incurring new debt to pay off current debt, or to put off paying any debt.  According to Alexander Jung, writing for Der Spiegel in Germany, the following is a summary of what's happening with the current Ponzi schemes in Europe and the US:

• There are the banks in Europe, which will have to repay about €725 billion in combined debt in 2012, including €280 billion in the first quarter alone. With the private market largely off-limits to them, the banks have had to rely on the European Central Bank (ECB) to bail them out. The ECB is now lending them fresh money -- as much as they want -- at minimal interest rates.
   

• There is a country like Italy, which has an exorbitant amount of debt to service at the beginning of the year. About €160 billion in debt will mature between January and April; the total for the entire year is about €300 billion. The government in Rome is already having trouble finding buyers for its bonds.
   

• There is the ECB, which is creating billions essentially out of nothing.  On an almost weekly basis, it is acquiring bonds that no one else would buy from Portugal, Spain and Italy and, in the process, it is turning into a reluctant financier of nations. This financial aid already amounts to €211 billion.
   

• There is the European Commission, whose president, José Manuel Barroso, supports the use of so-called euro bonds. These bonds, which would be issued jointly by the countries in the monetary union, would amount to an accumulation of collective debt on top of national debts.
   

• There is the €440-billion euro bailout fund, of which €150 billion are already promised to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. But because this amount is still not enough, the finance ministers have decided to "leverage" the fund, a seemingly harmless term for bringing in additional lenders, thereby multiplying the volume of credit.
   

• And then there is the United States, which only remains solvent because the Congress in Washington keeps raising the debt ceiling. The American government already owes its creditors about $15 trillion. Stay tuned for the next installment.

When will planet Earth's Ponzi scheme end?  When the central bankers run out of suckers to con.  Hopefully when Ron Paul gets elected to the US Presidency in 2012 and dismantles the Federal Reserve.

--  Jan 06  In the Idaho Statesman Socialist Editorial Department, the editors applaud Gov Butch Otter for "maturing."  "Maturing" is now the Statesman editors' new euphemism for "collectivism," more accurately described by economic "fascism" in which the state manages a pretended free market.  What's the big issue?  Gov Otter -- a pretended Libertarian, supposedly schooled by free market mentor Ralph Smeed -- is making an argument to establish a state run health insurance exchange for Idaho.  Why?  Because Otter wants to receive $20 million from the federal government's ObamaCare, a nationalized health care abomination now under review -- or soon to be -- by the US Supreme Court.  Listen to how the Idaho Statesman describes Medicaid:  "Medicaid is a terrific investment for Idaho.  For every 30-cents the state puts in, the feds pony up a 70-cent match."  Except for one thing.  From where do the economic-idiots at the Idaho Statesman newspaper think the federal government obtains the $20 million to distribute "free money" to Idaho?  And from where do the economic-idiots at the Idaho Statesman think the feds obtain the trillions and trillions of dollars that it will take to fund ObamaCare?  Do the editors even correlate our current $15 trillion dollar national debt, hyperinflation of our money supply, high unemployment, housing bubble, and current global recession with all of the pulp fiction dollars -- not backed by anything -- that the feds are passing out to everybody in the nation?  And in Federal Reserve "swaps" to the European Union?  Money does not grow on trees.  It is not being collected by taxes.  It is simply being printed up or digitized on federal computers.  Health care is not some commodity whose billions of market parameters are somehow exempt from the basic laws of economics.  Printing up pulp fiction dollars and distributing them out to all the states for wonderfully humane intended purposes is turning out to be exactly the opposite:  the nation is collapsing under a huge burden of debt and people are becoming less able to afford or obtain the shrinking commodity we call medical care.  Or even a job.  All brought about by the same type of thinking espoused by the editors at the Idaho Statesman.  It doesn't matter whether you call it socialism, fascism, or any other form of state collectivism.  And when another politician -- in this case, Idaho Gov Butch Otter, falls for the siren call of "free money" from the feds, it is just as stupid to claim that "he has matured."  Otter has not "matured."  He has become blinded by the false light at the end of the socialist tunnel.  A better description is to say that Otter has "devolved" into the contradiction of altruistic collectivism, which inherently must fail since it destroys the very pricing mechanism necessary for any free market to succeed.

--  Sun Jan 08, 2012... Best in 2011, Tue Sep 06  Pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, shut up, and listen (from Doug Casey at Casey Gold Reports):

Q:  Is there any way to stop this economic train wreck from occurring?

A: "Right now the US Government is spending over a trillion and a half dollars more than they are taking in – but that's as good as it's going to get. We're already in the best of all possible worlds, considering what's happened. It gets vastly worse from here. As unemployment and business failures start going up, the government's deficit will rise to $2 trillion per year. They talked about cutting $2 or $3 or $4 trillion, but that's over 10 years and it's loaded towards the end of the 10 years; their supposed cuts are inconsequential, trivial, and meaningless. In addition, there's no reason to believe that spending won't skyrocket from here, because Congress is going to change next year, and again two years after that. They'll all have new cockamamie spending ideas. So this is all a complete charade.

To answer the question, the only ultimate cure for this is that interest rates go back up to the 12 or 14% level, which would reward prudent savers and punish borrowers. But that's just a start. Military spending should be cut 90%, with the closure of all foreign bases, covert operations, and aid. Regulatory agencies like the SEC, the FDA, HUD, USDA, DOE, OSHA, FAA, EPA, etc., etc. should be abolished. The Fed should be abolished and gold reinstituted as money. The national debt should be overtly defaulted on for numerous reasons, but certainly because it acts as a mortgage on future generations. But none of that's going to happen, rather the opposite. These prescriptions, while economically and morally correct, are a complete political pipe dream.

A big part of the problem is that people have been consuming more than they have been producing. So the way to get the economy back on track is for people to produce more than they consume and save the difference. High interest rates encourage that. But the government is opposed to high interest rates, partly because it runs counter to Keynesian theory and partly because it would greatly accelerate the bankruptcy of the government.

Let's say interest rates go from the 2% level they are now to a 12% level. That's going to mean that interest payments on the whole national debt – which has basically been financed short term and has to be rolled over annually – will go from say $300 billion per year (2% of $15 trillion) to $1.8 trillion per year. The deficit, therefore, must increase by another $1.5 trillion dollars a year if you do the single most important thing to slow down this train wreck.

So, I think they have actually gone beyond the point of no return. There's no way to avoid a genuine catastrophe, much worse than what happened in the 1930s. There are several ways this could end, but I suspect the government will choose the worst alternative. I suspect the destruction of the US dollar is in their minds. How are we going to get rid of all this debt? Well, destroying the US dollar is the only way. Their first priority is saving the US Government.

But they're not considering that the people who will be hurt the worst are the prudent people, people who have saved dollars. They will destroy the prudent parts of society that actually try to produce more than they consume and save the difference. Prudent middle class workers are going to be wiped out, and the people who borrow and are deeply in debt are going to be rewarded by having their debt wiped out. That's perverse. It is going to wipe out the middle class in the US and all over the world. Everywhere in the world, people have preferred to save in US dollars where they can, and those people are going to be wiped out. Perhaps even worse, it's going to put the US government temporarily back on a manageable financial basis. That means they won't have to fire all their employees or disband all these agencies and get rid of the military, which is what should be done. They'll wind up destroying the productive parts of the economy to save the government; the parasite will kill the host. It's a total disaster, with wide-ranging consequences, and it's going to happen in this decade." -- Doug Casey, Casey Gold Reports

--  Jan 06  Listen up, girl friends.  In the Right To Bear Arms, 2nd Amendment department, scenario # 1:  Two hyped up druggies looking for more drugs kicked the door down of Sarah McKinley and her 3-month old son in Oklahoma.  The men, armed with knives, killed both Sarah and her son, found no drugs, and ran away.  Scenario # 2:  Two hyped up druggies looking for more drugs kicked the door down of Sarah McKinley and her 3-month old son in Oklahoma.  One of the men, armed with a knife, was killed by Sarah who calmly blew him away with her loaded shotgun.  The other man ran away and was later apprehended.  What really happened?  Scenario # 2 and Sarah has no regrets.  The police finally arrived, cleaned up the scene and the Oklahoma DA say they will not prosecute Sarah since she acted in obvious self-defense.  And that's why you own a gun, home owners.  Otherwise, it's scenario # 1.

--  Jan 02  The Debt Ceiling Simplified.  Democrats don't understand The Debt Ceiling.  Republicans don't understand The Debt Ceiling.  Liberals don't understand The Debt Ceiling.  Neocons don't understand The Debt Ceiling.  Allow me to explain:  Let's say you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood (say, in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where a housewife, lawyer, and real estate agent on the Board of the Home Owners Association stupidly try to run their own home-grown sewage treatment plant for 800 homes).  Your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.  What do you think you should do?  Raise the ceilings or pump out the shit?  At the national level, your choice is coming next November 2012.  Don't miss the opportunity.  (Oh, Hidden Springs Town Council:  buy a new sewer pump, belatedly -- since the dummies on the Board didn't stock a spare.  It will only take 3 months to receive a new pump.  But they did buy a ladder.)

--  Jan 01  Happy New Year!  2012 will be a pivotal year in politics.  Will President Barack Obama be thrown out of office, along with all his socialist cronies and ObamaCare?  Who knows?  It all depends on whether the dummies who elected him in 2008 have now wised up.  Don't bet on it but we can always hope.  Better yet, get out there and do something about it.  Not only by voting yourself, but also by convincing others to show up to the polls and vote against Barack Obama AND replace the current crop of progressive Liberals in the US Senate.  Optimum Wish List to win, from a free market and strong defense point of view:  President Ron Paul, Vice President Michelle Bachmann, and US Secretary of the Treasury Rand Paul.  Front runner GOP candidate Mitt Romney is simply another RINO who can best be described as Obama-Lite.  There is no philosophical difference between President Barack Obama and Romney.  It is only a matter of degree:  how much fascism or socialism or whatever form of state collectivism do you want?  Neither Romney or Obama would dump the Federal Reserve and return to a sound monetary system, which is the key to solving the global financial crisis.  The return to a gold standard would automatically solve a majority of all that ails the global economy.  That, and a voluntary reduction in the overpopulation of planet Earth.  In fact, we are faced with three root problems:  (1) Overpopulation, eight billion people on a planet of our size that should only support about 500 million humans, (2) World governments using fake paper and digitized money to rob each other and lower entire cultures down to the level of subsistence agriculture, and (3) The major religions of the world whose moral philosophy is tantamount to altruistic state collectivism.  We may one day soon find out that we are not alone in the universe and that will be a time of reckoning when others who can travel much further, much faster, and have mastered a higher level of technology and spiritual awareness inform us of our idiotic misdeeds on planet Earth.  Happy New Year.  So don't just sit there, go out and undo something.

--  Dec 29  Whoa, cow girls, jump off your ponies, pull up the barn floor, shut up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Idaho Gov. Butch has a great idea:  let's implement fascism!  Yahoo and yippy-kai-yea. Otter is proposing -- and will deliver his briliant non-free market ideas in his State of the State Address -- to tax the people of Idaho during our 2nd Great Recession, happening now in a city near you, and fork the money over to some bureaucratic committee's favorite start up businesses.  Wow.  Isn't that just what President Barack Obama did when he routed over $500 million to his favorite -- now bankrupt -- solar energy company?  Apparently, during this 2nd Great Recession, Idaho has a surplus -- a surplus? -- of tax money and the politicians think it is a good idea to implement the same economic fascism that the state of Utah just implemented.  All you gotta do is throw out the words "high tech" or "whoop-tee-doo" and the public is supposed to fall on the floor, foam at the mouth, and scream, "Yeaaa, bring it on, bring on the free market through state business start up schemes!"  Duh... the free market?  Gov Otter isn't even trying to hide the fact that this is not a free market mechanism.  Apparently, he learned nothing about laissez-faire free market capitalism from his former mentor Ralph Smeed, who recently passed away.  The issue is not how much money Otter thinks the state can generate by using tax money to fund government chosen enterprises.  The issue is the free market vs. government fascism as an economic model.  Why should other start up businesses be taxed along with the population at large to finance the start up of their competitors?  Why should anybody be taxed to finance anybody else's start up business?  That's why we have banks, venture capitalists, and a stock market, isn't it?  Or is it?  Well, not any more.  At least not in Gov. Butch Otter's NewSpeak for "capitalism."  It has now been replaced with the word "collectivist fascism."  Hopefully, Idaho House Majority Leader, Mike Moyle, and the GOP led legislature will not fall for this ill-advised economic ploy.  Otherwise, can I get a $5 million state business grant to start up my sno-cone and high tech yo-yo kiosk at Boise's Fifth & Main?  My CEO salary will start at only $3 million per year.

--  Wed Dec 28  President Obama is now asking Congress to raise the US debt ceiling by another $1.2 trillion in freshly printed -- sorry, digitized -- Monopoly Money.  Why?  So we can pay more interest on our previous debt to the central bankers whose only job is to create more and more inflation out of thin air.  Meanwhile, our Parliament of Whores in Congress has no idea, no clue, no guts, no cajones about how to cut our $15 trillion dollar ridiculous budget.  State and local economies are now undergoing the same bankruptcy scenarios that the federal government is undergoing.  Even little home owner associations are beginning to feel the pinch as the mortgage crisis continues to hit home owners who have lost their jobs and their Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are doubling on their underwater homes -- a triple whammy of sorts.  You lose your job, your house payment doubles, and the value of your home drops to lower than whale poop at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.  Boom, boom, boom, it's foreclosure time.  And President Obama and the US Congress are so caught up in Keynesian Quantitative Economics that all they can think of to do is pour more gasoline on a raging gasoline fire.  That's funny.  The same thing is happening in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Britain, Germany, Ireland, Japan, China, the Middle East, African nations, South America, and Switzerland.  Wow, hey, you think there might be any connection between what's happening financially in all these nations?  it's a freaking virus from Mars, right?  No?  Oh... dang...  what a mystery...

--  Mon Dec 26  Whoa, pull up the barn floor, listen up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.  Picture this.  A group of bankers in Europe are busy playing Monopoly.  They're rolling the dice, moving pieces around the board, and buying and selling the European equivalent of B & O Railroad, the Electric Company, Marvin Gardens, and Baltic Ave.  Some players are called "central bankers" while others are called "member bankers."  Member bankers are members of various central banks such as the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and their guest central banker from America, the Federal Reserve.  Woo-hoo.  What a game; what a party.  And all the players in this giant Monopoly game are busy arguing with each other.  Maybe they all had too much vino to drink, who knows?  So what, exactly, are they arguing about?  Well, money, of course.  The "central bankers" and the "member bankers" all want to borrow and loan each other tons and tons more Monopoly Money.  But, Parker Brothers only ships its Monopoly game with a finite amount of Monopoly Money and the players in Europe have run out.  As in bankrupt.  As in oops, no more moolah.  Oh what to do, what to do?  "Wait," says the ECB, the IMF, and the Federal Reserve, who just bought Park Place and put a hotel on it.  "Let's just print up some more Monopoly Money and loan it to each other."  "Yeah, why not?" said all the banker-players, "Let's just print up more Monopoly Money since, after all, it's just paper and guess what, we have a printing press in the basement."  "Yahoo!" they all screamed simultaneously in the key of C-flat Major.  So, the bankers in bankrupt Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and -- go get a world atlas to figure out the rest of the nations in the European Union -- said Britain has to fork over freshly minted $200 billion in Pound Notes of Monopoly Money to loan to the IMF so the IMF can transform said Pounds into Euro currency and loan said Euros to bankrupt Italy, France, Greece, Ireland, and Germany and whomever else in the European Union is sucker enough to go for this Ponzi Scheme.  Hey, it's only a game, ha-ha, isn't it?  But all of a sudden the bankers in Britain stand up and shout, "Whoa, pardners" -- because they like alt-country western music -- "we don't think it's fair for us to have to crank up $200 billion Pounds out of no-wheres-ville to give to Italy, France, Greece, Ireland, and Germany via the IMF so they can buy up Marvin Gardens and Connecticut Ave!"  "We like Pennsylvania Ave. and all the properties on the entire Atlantic Boardwalk," chimed in the Federal Reserve, playing their cards close to their vests and sending Monopoly Money dollar swaps across the Atlantic Ocean to the European Central Bank.  "Hey," said Germany, "if you Limies don't fork over the $200 billion Pounds, we will have to come up with $50 billion Euros out of our own stash in the closet next to the dope because nobody is buying the new Monopoly Money Euro bonds -- even at 7% yield -- from Italy, France, Greece, Ireland, and, you know, Lower Slobovia."  "Tough patooties, or ist das Potatoes," said the British Parliament of Whores.  "Well, oh yeah?" said Germany's Prime Rib Minister Sheila Merkel, or is it Suzy Merkel?  Who can remember, they all look alike.  And so it goes, this giant game of Monopoly Money in Europe, attended by US not-so-mysterious guest the Federal Reserve wearing a Halloween costume so nobody recognizes them except US Rep. Ron Paul running for the US presidency.  But here's the really funny part:  The Monopoly Money that all the bankers are arguing about?  None of it is real money.  None of it is backed by anything.  Not by anybody's GDP -- because governments don't own everybody's private property, which is what makes up a nation's GDP.  There are no real promissory notes to pay anybody with except, you guessed it, more fake Monopoly Money.  The same fake money with which the bankers buy Marvin Gardens and Park Place.  It's all a big banking hoax.  Paper and digitized debt.  Smoke and mirrors.  No money, honey.  Soon, everybody playing this giant game of Monopoly in Europe will be pulling out their derringers and Colt .45s and blasting away at each other because, well, because their neighbor's fake Monopoly Money is what, fakier Monopoly Money than their own?  And everybody owes everybody else.  On paper.  And the bankers are getting richer and richer, until the mob drags them out into the street and hangs them by their own derivatives and credit default swaps.  Default is the key word here.  Who started this fake Monopoly Money game in the first place and why are we continuing to pretend it's for real?  I don't know.  I'm just waiting for Atlas to call everybody's bluff and shrug.  By the way, who the hell is John Galt?

--  Sun Dec 25  How does a respectable group of people, an entire culture, a nation with essentially the same moral philosophy, morph from a system of individual rights and freedoms to a system of tribal collectivism and destruction?  How did we change from a life of private property rights and freedom of exchange in ideas, commodities and services limited to the rule of law, to a life of complete government control and regulation, dog eat dog government economics, extolling the rule of man?  Easy.  It happens very, very slowly.  One small philosophical step at a time until, one day, that previously respectable group of people who thought they were living under a Constitution and Bill of Rights that was instituted to protect the individual, the smallest minority possible, has changed into the Divine Right of Government.  The Divine Right of Tribal Collectivism, Kings, Queens, Fascist Dictators, Communists, and Socialist Blocs.  Thus, Rome conquered the then known world and continued the philosophy that slavery was OK.  Later, Europe did the same.  So did Japan, the Shoguns.  So did China, Chairman Mao.  And Cuba, and Venezuela, and Mexico, and all the nations of the Middle East and the African continent.  From the Egyptians onward to presidents George Bush and Barack Obama's America today, the overwhelming trend in moral philosophy has been altruistic collectivism, the pathetic excuse for the extermination of millions upon millions of individuals whose only crime was: they existed.  Except for a brief period in the American colonies in the 18th century when a few individuals created a system of limited government and preached the novel idea that it is the individual, not the collective, whose rights are universally created by Nature, a logically created Universe, planet Earth has been ruled by nothing but dog eat dog tribal collectivists.  Those tribal collectivists' main concern is -- and always has been -- perpetuating collectivism itself.  Not the truth, not individual rights and freedoms, and not the free market in ideas and commodities.  Today, as we celebrate the birthday of one of our past prophets whose message of Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You has often been completely distorted by twisting His message into organized collectivist religions for those at the top who benefit most by it, we should all rethink what it is that we can do as individuals to bring the human race on planet Earth back to the basic laws of a logically created universe.  The Ten Commandments work.  So do the US Bill of Rights.  The only thing we have our current president Barack Obama and his collectivist administration to thank for is this:  he has brought this nation, our culture, the essence of our moral philosophy, to such a low level of tribal collectivism so rapidly -- much more rapidly than anybody in both major political parties would have done -- that he has made it perfectly clear what the reality of living under a fascist, a tribal collectivist, government would be like.  So much so, that it is not happening slowly, step by step, but rather so fast that nobody but a fool could miss what the end game will be.  And that, mes amies, is the good that President Barack Obama has brought to the moral philosophical table of individual freedom vs. tribal collectivism:  the clarity of the destructive nature of altruistic collectivism in all its manifest forms, whether you call it fascism, communism, socialism, progressivism, or just a plain old simplistic dictatorship.  It is happening fast.  You can't miss it.  It's clear as a bell.  It isn't happening slowly any more.  You have no excuse for not recognizing the morphing of a limited individual rights nation, the United States of America, into what truly amounts to a fascist form of government in which everybody has essentially lost all of their rights and freedoms, and all upon the alter of the reigning moral philosophy called altruistic collectivism.  If you think we're not living in George Orwell's 1984, take another look.  In America, in 2011 and 2012 on planet Earth, we are now the pigs in the Farmhouse.  This is what you must think about today on Immanuel's birthday, whether you believe in the Bible, the Talmud, or the Koran:  how we can get back to the universal law of creation in which the individual's rights and freedoms -- mutually non-infringing freedoms -- are paramount to any oppressive form of government.  Freedom does not rhyme with The Borg, The Clan, or The Tribe.  It rhymes with YOU and ME, as individuals, not US, as a collective.  Merry Christmas to everybody, as Jesus was a prophet for everybody, everywhere, not just Christians on Earth.  His real message was truly more universal than most individuals will ever know in this life time.

--  Sat Dec 24  Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize favorite buddy producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.  Hey, welcome to the United States in 2011 and 2012.  And Europe, too.

--  Mon Dec 19  North Korea's Kim Short-Man's-Syndrome Jong IL knocked off with a heart attack yesterday at the ripe old age of 69.  Oh boo hoo, we will really miss this rotten dictator.  The real question, however, is why did we allow Korea to be divided up into a North and a South in the first place?  I mean, who was in charge of this arrangement after World War II?  US General McArthur warned us not to do it... but we did it anyway.  Just like we created an East and West Berlin and an East and West Germany.  Why?  So more countries could participate in the Olympics or what?  So we could have a perpetual war for which to fund perpetual war bonds?  Who knows?  How stupid.  And now Kim Ding-Dong IL's third son of a B -- a four star general at age 22 or 27 or some God awful young age inappropriate to his level of command -- has been ushered in as the new Ding-Dong Dictator.  Somebody buy this kid a new X-Box and ship him off to China or the Greek Isles to play "Your Volkswagen Beetle, Gone in 5 Seconds" or "Macho Man, Looking For His Testosterone Pills" or some other game to keep his mind off the nukes he inherited from Poppa Ding-Dong.  That's just what this world needs:  another little Napoleon Bonaparte trying to prove he's a 7-foot tall body builder.  Give him another sugar doughnut.  Somebody tear down the wall between North and South Korea, will ya?  Take those nukes away from Little Jr. Ding-ong and let the North Korean people go free.  Hey, where's the United Nations Peacekeepers?  Oops, I forgot, out raping women in war-torn African nations.

--  Mon Dec 19  Swedish automobile maker Saab is sobbing all the way to bankruptcy court this week as it ran out of asphalt and also enough Swedish Kroners to bail its tailpipes out of indebtedness.  Saab has been in the pits since last September when its parent owner, Obama's Government Motors (GM), pulled the spark plugs on the wiped out company.  The important thing to note about Saab is that it owns $3 billion Kroner, which equals $433 million dollars, worth of parts, equipment, and tools.  If $3 billion Kroner equals $433 million dollars, think how much the Swedish Kroner is inflated relative to the dollar:  like 7 times worth.  So, a $50,000 Mercedes would cost about $350,000 Kroner?  Whoa, how much is a hamburger, girl friends?  $35 bucks?  Hey, let's go to MacDonald's in Stockholm with a family of four and have lunch.  It'll only set you back $210 Kroners.  Then we'll catch a movie, let's say Jack 'n Jill Fall in Love with Dracula and The Werewolf at $10 bucks per head, or in Swedish socialist currency, only $60 Kroner for this thriller-diller in 3D.  Hoo boy, family night out with the kids for only $270 Kroners.  No wonder Saab went bankrupt and everybody in the Aurora Borealis welfare state will soon be riding bicycles to work.  Did I say work?  Hey, nobody in Sweden works.  Everybody is on the wonderful freebie government dole.  Free education, free medical, free food, free pensions, free... yeah... free Saabs... not coming to a dealer near you any time soon...

--  Sun Dec 18  Oh-oh, girl friends, I hope the Canyon County Commissioners -- down the road apiece from Boise's Ada County -- are carrying "fidelity" insurance.  "Fidelity" insurance is coverage for fraud and embezzlement and is standard insurance that boards of directors should carry, along with standard Director's and Officer's Liability Insurance.  Political boards, Home Owners Associations, and other non-profit Boards are crazy, naive, or stupid if they do not carry "fidelity" insurance.  A good policy costs about $1,000 to $1,500 per year and offers "historical discovery" for instances in which fraud or embezzlement occurred in the past that the board did not know about.  (As a current Town Council Director at Hidden Springs, Idaho, 3 miles from Boise, I have yet to convince the other four Town Council Directors that we should carry "fidelity" insurance for the $1.4 million in liquid assets that we manage.  Or obtain a standard annual audit.  Go figure.)  Anyway, back to the scene of the crime in Canyon County.  It seems like the dummies on the Canyon County Commission stupidly allowed their former prosecutor, John Bujak, to keep county money in his private trust account that only he could access.  Duh...  Immediately after Bujak was given the OK to keep prosecutorial contract money in his private accounts, he began transferring $10,000 at a whack into his account.  According to the Idaho Statesman newspaper, "From the time Bujak resigned and through various legal proceedings, county commissioners have alleged Bujak wrongfully took about $300,000 in contract funds promised to the county."  The Idaho State Bar Association -- yeah, you got it, girl friends, Bujak is a lawyer -- has filed a complaint that could result in the suspension of Bujak's license to practice law.  Remind me, girl friends, to tell you about a similar incident in the quaint little township of Hidden Springs, population 3,000 or so  -- also known as "Pleasantville" after the black and white movie of the same name that finally turned into color after all the political and social corruption in Pleasantville was revealed at the end of the movie.  If convicted, Bujak stands to go to prison for 14 years on each of two charges of grand theft:  embezzlement and deception.  Plus $10,000 in fines.  The formal charges are that Bujak allegedly improperly transferred about $236,000 for his personal use between September 2009 and June 2010 while managing the contract to use county staff and resources to prosecute misdemeanors for the city of Nampa.  As a corollary, I wonder what the Idaho State Bar Association and FINRA (government watchdog of NASDAQ and SEC) would say about the previous president/treasurer (a lawyer) of Hidden Springs and another Town Council Director who invested $100,000 of the Hidden Springs home owners association money into the stock market through said Town Council Director's personal financial services company in 2009 and 2010?  Ya-yess, girl friends, and according to Schedule D, capital gains and losses of the Hidden Springs federal tax returns for 2009 and 2010, they traded 561 times in the stock market --  buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, sell -- through investment brokerage house Trust Co. of America, driving the IRS Cost Basis up to $971,000 for 2009 and 2010, eventually pulling out for a net loss of $5,500 of the non-profit HOA's funds.  This is called "day-trading" and constitutes an obvious conflict of interest and a breach of fiduciary responsibility to the home owners' association.  Then the next Hidden Springs treasurer suggested investing $343,000 up to about $500,000 of the non-profit HOA's funds into, again, the stock market, this time through Vanguard brokerage house where the treasurer invested his own personal funds.  Wow, talk about another conflict of interest position.  Luckily, a Petition to Safeguard Hidden Springs Funds stopped this absurdity and no funds were invested through Vanguard.  No wonder the majority Hidden Springs Town Council Directors do not want an audit for 2009 or 2010 or 2011.  And they have rejected "fidelity" insurance coverage on multiple occasions.  What?  Are they as naive as the Canyon County Commissioners or... ?  Yours truly is the only Hidden Springs Town Council Director calling for both a complete forensic audit for years 2009, 2010, and 2011 AND for carrying standard "fidelity" insurance because, hey, you never know when a U of I treasurer like Jerry Wallace in the $250 million Boise Watergate fiasco (convicted) might come along or when a John Bujak (on trial) might pop up.  Of course, everybody should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  But people who do not understand the concept of "conflict of interest" or "appearance of impropriety" need to wake up, keep their actions transparent, and smell the coffee:  preferably a hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.

--  Sun Dec 18  Whoa, shut up, pull up the barn floor, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.  France's Nuclear rod manufacturing company, Areva, announced they are cutting back on plans to build a centrifuge and nuke enrichment plant in Northern Idaho.  Why?  Areva Inc. is expected to post a $2.12 billion loss this year.  The French company is whacking 1,500 jobs in Germany and is busy re-thinking all of its future capital investments world-wide.  Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, attempting to soften the bad news to Idaho's economy, released a news blurb stating everything is hunky dory.  Areva's slamming on the brakes to build a nuke enrichment plant in Idaho, said the Governor, is just a hiccupy little bump in the road to uh-huh, you betchum, for sure the future building of the $3 billion nuke rod manufacturing plant near Idaho's existing INL (formerly INEL).  Other sites that Idaho beat out in the bid for Areva to build its nuke facility included New Mexico and Texas.  Individuals against Areva Co. choosing Idaho's INL location to build such a facility, cite the fact that they would be building their plant on top of the Snake Plain Aquifer (an underground aquifer as large as Lake Erie), which sits on top of one of the world's largest volcanic calderas.  If anything happened to crack the underground lava tubes -- naturally by Mother Nature or unnaturally by terrorists -- and allow that much water to enter the volcanic caldera, AND a nuclear rod manufacturing facility was sitting on top of it all, we could experience the Mother of All Perfect Storms:  a radioactive volcanic super blast that would take out a good portion of the United States and affect the rest of the globe.  Read the following articles from the archives of FM Duck:

02-22-2008
Idaho Legies create Perfect Storm:  yellowcake plus Yellowstone plus Snake Plain Aquifer equals radioactive Super Volcanic blast  More...

03-25-2008  Gov Butch Otter signs corporate welfare Bill for $2 billion Uranium-235 enrichment plant to set Idaho up for Perfect Nuclear Storm:  a radioactive, volcanic firestorm on top of Snake Plain Aquifer's Lake Erie  More...

What's the chance that any of the above scenarios could happen?  Very slim.  But the real question is:  what's the risk/reward Return on Investment for not building this facility in Idaho and building it somewhere else?  The risk is much higher building it in Idaho and very low for building it, say, in the Texas desert.  Why even consider taking the chance?  Hopefully, Areva will dump all its future plans to build a nuclear enrichment facility in Idaho and either not build it at all, or not build it in our back yard.  Au revoire, Areva.

-- Sun Dec 18  This amazing cartoon was in the Chicago Tribune in 1934. Look carefully at the plan of action.  Note who's driving the out-of-control wagon:  university professors.  Note Stalin and Karl Marx babbling the same type of Obama fascist Progressive plan to "fundamentally transform" America.  Remember the adage, "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

--  Sat Dec 17  According to reports by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge, Australian banks have been given one week to prepare for what might become a European financial and social "Meltdown."

Previously we had heard extensive horror stories about banks being told to prepare for the end of the world in case the European summit failed.  According to the Australian Finance Review, banks down under "have been given 1 week by regulators to stress test how they would handle a spike in joblessness and a plunge in home prices spurred by the EU debt crisis."  Aka a European "Meltdown."  Bloomberg First Word describes for us what the article says:

• Australian Prudential Regulation Authority envisions a worst-case scenario of 12% unemployment, a 30% drop in house prices, and a 40% fall in commercial property values,
   

• Banks will assume that write-offs, other mitigation measures are unavailable; later stress tests might allow for such steps,
   

• Australia’s banks have Aus $87.2b of exposure to Europe, or 2.7% of assets, with Aus $74.6b of it mostly tied to bank borrowers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Why is this notable? Because unlike before, when media reports were really a propaganda ploy to get European politicians to collaborate (what has now proven to be an impossible task), and nothing but a rhetorical device, this time around, the warning is for real. And, more importantly, we have a sense of urgency, courtesy of the 1 week deadline: the question then is, is it really that bad, and does Europe truly have a little over a week for global banks to prepare for the inevitable fall out?

Lastly, how long until our own prudent leaders in the US decide it may be time to push the Stress Test scheduled for next year forward, just in case the "unthinkable" does happen, and US banks end up getting stampeded even as the rest of the world is already prepared for a worst case scenario?

We are confident US Secretary of the Empty Treasury -- Tim Geithner -- will get right back to us asap on all of these open items.  By the way, where's the missing gold from Ft. Knox?  Oh who cares?  Non-redeemable paper is just as good, right?

--  Wed Dec 14  The Wall Street Journal this morning reads, "All That Glitters, Will Not Solve Europe's Debt Woes".  The story starts off with the line that, "European governments have a lot of gold, but that won't be much help."  Oh yeah?  Wanna bet?  Not at current gold prices, it won't, but re-pricing of the world's central bank gold reserves would be a ticket out of this mess.  And that's why the editors at even The Wall Street Journal continually miss the point:  namely, the world's central bankers have purposely disconnected all hard commodity backing from the issuance of their pulp fiction paper and digitized money precisely so they could inflate every nation's currencies to earn unlimited interest.  That is the name of the central bank Ponzi Scheme:  create fiat money out of nothing, charge interest, and rake in the profits.  And, as long as the suckers believe government "economists" that value per se resides in paper rolling off national printing presses, the central bankers will continue to rob us.  The moral philosophy for all this hyper-inflation is based on the premise of altruistic state collectivism.  All ya gotta do is obtain the sanction of your intended victims -- uh, that's you, folks -- and you can print up as much fake paper money as you want to save everybody from everything all the time and everywhere.  Except for one thing:  eventually you run out of victims and the debt ceiling hits the quintillion dollar level, at which point nobody will accept your pulp fiction money.  Of course, that's when WW III kicks in and provides the central bankers with yet another reason to pump up the money supply:  War bonds, yippee!  Round and round it goes, where it stops everybody knows:  total bankruptcy and lots of civil and international strife.  That's how socialism, communism, and fascism always end up.  Morally and financially bankrupt.  Individual rights, private property rights, and free market capitalism?  Gone with the wind... unless Americans wake up for the 2012 Elections.

--  Sun Dec 11  "Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank; give a man a central bank and he can rob the world."

--  Sun Dec 11 Dead Horse Theory

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And, of course...
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

--  Thur Dec 08  In his inimitable socialist style, President Barack Obama has called for everybody's "shared sacrifice" to pull us out of his current Recession.  What?  Obama's Recession you ask?  How could that be?  Wasn't it previous President George Bush who created today's Recession?  Or did both presidents contribute?  In fact, haven't most all our past two century's presidents from Woodrow Wilson onward, from both major parties, created our current huge indebtedness using the Federal Reserve to prime the financial pump?  Free markets do not create recessions; interventions by governments into free markets create recessions.  Free markets, defined as mutually agreed upon voluntary exchanges, do not arbitrarily set interest rates to zero, do not use fiat paper currencies for money instead of gold, do not restrict free trade across any borders, and do not interfere in the creation of real market prices.  Only the government can screw it all up and that's exactly what Congress and the Executive Branch for both major political parties have been doing for many decades.  The only truth in Obama's preaching against the rich is that today's rich are the current central bankers who have gotten filthy rich precisely by using Obama's -- and previous presidents' -- governments to intervene with monetary controls to enrich themselves.  So just who is Obama railing against except himself and his continual policies of indebtedness?  And now we're being asked to "sacrifice" ourselves on Obama's Interventionist Altar of Altruistic Collectivism while he plays golf for 16 days at a resort in Hawaii?  Aloha to you, too, Mr. President.

--  Mon Dec 05  We don't usually discuss sports here at FM Duck but college football's BCS (Bowl Championship Series) has gotten way, way out of hand.  They must be taking cheating lessons from the Federal Reserve.  Quoting sports writer Brian Murphey on the Idaho Statesman's Sports Page:

"This year, the BCS produces a title-game rematch that most fans don't want, rewarded three teams that didn't even win their six-team divisions, and a fourth that was blown out in its conference championship game.

By its own standings, the BCS left out teams ranked Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 and found spots for teams ranked Nos. 10, 11, 13, 16 and 23.  Boise State (ranked 7) -- passed over for the fourth time when ranked in the top 10 of the BCS Standings -- certainly has reason to be disappointed and angry at a bowl system that leaves it playing 6-6 Arizona State."

Boise State quarterback, Kellen Moore, is one of the most prolific QBs in the history of college football, and BSU at 11-1 can't get a bowl game such as the Orange Bowl where it's W. Virginia (9-3) vs. Clemsen (10-3), or the Sugar Bowl where it's Michigan (10-2) vs. Va Tech (11-2), or even the Rose Bowl where it's Wisconsin (11-2) vs. Oregon (11-2).  BSU has beaten the snot of some of these teams more than once in recent years, kicked Georgia's butt this year, and we still can't get into a BCS bowl game.  Stanford (11-1) and Oklahoma St. (11-1) may deserve to play in the Fiesta Bowl, where BSU kicked Oklahoma's little derriere a coupla years ago with a simple Statue of Liberty play, but even the BCS recently said that Stanford's difficulty of opponents was three times easier than Boise State's this year.  Go put that in your Hookah and smoke it, BCS judges.

There comes a time when enough is enough.  And -- as in all political economy, and trust me, this is all about politics and money -- all it takes for the corruption to continue is for a few good men and women to remain silent.  Sports fans in Boise are mad as hell and this time we are not going to remain silent.

Let's stop voluntarily being the victims.  And let's stop allowing the BCS to obtain the sanction of the victims by always caving in.  It's time to politely but forcefully speak out.

FM Duckster urges Coach Peterson and the Boise State Broncos to make a statement by boycotting the Las Vegas MAACO Bowl in which we are scheduled to play Arizona St. (6-6).  It's a slap in our face and a slap in Arizona St.'s face, too.  We urge Arizona St., a fine college, to join us in this boycott.

Enough is enough!

--  Mon Dec 05  Whoa, girl friends, the debt crisis is getting hot on The Continent.  That's the European mainland for those of you don't get out much.  The Euro currency could collapse within a few weeks or few months with each nation going back to its previous national currency.  If it happens, here's a likely course of action:  First, Greece, then Ireland and Portugal, then Italy and Spain, then France and Belgium, then Germany.  On Nov 23, Germany could only sell half of its $6 billion govt bond offerings.  No takers.  Not many takers for Greece or Italy's 7% govt bond offerings either.  The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) could not sell their $ Trillion offerings and even if they did, it wouldn't be enough to bail out Spain and Portugal alone.  Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister and the ex-president of the European Commission, was asked in the German periodical, Der Spiegel, what he would do and he said, "I proposed bonds that are to be guaranteed by the state's gold reserves..."  Really?  Gold?  Kind of late but hey, whodda thunk... ?  By the way, where is the US gold that is supposed to be in Ft. Knox?

--  Sun Dec 04  Hey, heard the latest?  The US Federal Reserve is now trying to bail out the European Union nations with US dollar swaps.  By what authority does our central bank print up billions of dollars in one form or another and try to sop up the Euro mess created by their gangsta banksta buddies in Europe?  For one thing, it's unconstitutional.  But you're not going to hear about this in the national press because the Federal Reserve claims this action is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Feds claim they can't be audited for their action either.  Really?  Since when did the Federal Reserve trump the US Constitution's monetary clauses?  When somebody says they don't need to be audited (including your local home owners association), look out.  Especially our central bankers.  Why all the big secrecy if everything is on the up and up?  Hey, I have an idea.  Why not open up the vaults at Ft. Knox and show everybody that our gold reserves are still there?  Or are they?  And if not, where did they go?

--  Sat Dec 03  Whoa, girl friends, pull up the barn floor, shut up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  China surprised nobody yesterday -- except the editors at the NY Times -- by announcing that it would join the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the British Central Bankers, and all the other government central banks of the world to hyper-inflate the dukie out of its Toilet Paper currency, too.  Why?  Because Communism ain't the big success story that the drive-by media in the US has been claiming it is.  We all know that socialism, communism, and fascism doesn't work because it destroys the very free market parameters necessary for market success.  So, finally, China is fessing up that it is dead broke and is stupidly holding US debt, the dummies.  We got their products and they got our paper promises.  So who got the best of that deal?  Let me see, now...  I bought real live physical products made in China and China got stuck with paper T-Bills from the Federal Reserve.  Suckers.  Of course, everybody in the world is now going to face the financial disaster of more global inflation, a deeper Depression, and in the Third World nations:  famine, starvation, diseases, and total economic ruin.  Thank you central bankers, for destroying the global financial system with your fake money.

--  Sat Nov 26  Last week, Germany tried to sell $8 billion worth of government bonds but nobody showed up to the party.  Well, almost nobody.  The Krauts only sold $5 billion and thus are $3 billion short to finance their socialist welfare state.  Shades of Greece and Italy.  The Italians offered buyers a 7% yield on their government bonds and nobody showed up to that Pizza Party either.  Why not?  Because everybody knows that the governments in Europe are bankrupt will never be able to pay the bond holders in anything except more inflated Euros and, therefore, why would you put your money in a losing investment?  So much for trusting in government bonds and Treasuries.  I wonder if the same thing is happening in the US?  Oh, well, whaddaya know, guess who's holding most of the US Treasuries being pumped out by the Federal Reserve?  You guessed it:  it's the Federal Reserve itself!  Ya-yesss, girl friends, the Feds are now buying their own debt because China and nobody else is touching it with a ten-foot pole.  Has the train run off the tracks yet?  You decide.

--  Fri Nov 18  Pull up the barn floor, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java and listen up, girl friends:  China is bankrupt.  That's right.  According to Matthew Robertson of the Epoch Times, the same China that the US news media keeps babbling about as the epitome of whoop-tee-doo Shanghai capitalism, free markets, and blah blah baloney is running off their high speed railroad tracks and right over the financial cliff.  Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the Commie regime is in serious economic straits and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.  Every province in China, he said, is a debt-ridden Greece, ready to financially explode.  Lang’s assessment that the regime is bankrupt was based on five conjectures:

First, the regime’s debt sits at about 36 trillion yuan (US$5.68 trillion). This calculation is arrived at by adding up Chinese local government debt (between 16 trillion and 19.5 trillion yuan, or US$2.5 trillion and US$3 trillion), and the debt owed by state-owned enterprises (another 16 trillion, he said). But with interest of two trillion per year, he thinks things will unravel quickly.

Second, the regime’s officially published inflation rate of 6.2 percent is fabricated. The real inflation rate is 16 percent, according to Lang.

Third, there is serious excess capacity in the economy, and that private consumption is only 30 percent of economic activity. Lang said that beginning this July, the Purchasing Managers Index, a measure of the manufacturing industry, plunged to a new low of 50.7. This is an indication, in his view, that China’s economy is in recession.

Fourth, the regime’s officially published GDP of 9 percent is also fabricated. According to Lang’s data, China’s GDP has decreased 10 percent. He said that the bloated figures come from the dramatic increase in infrastructure construction, including real estate development, railways, and highways each year (accounting for up to 70 percent of GDP in 2010).

Fifth, taxes are too high. Last year, the taxes on Chinese businesses (including direct and indirect taxes) were at 70 percent of earnings. The individual tax rate sits at 81.6 percent, Lang said.

Once the “economic tsunami” starts, the regime will lose credibility and China will become the poorest country in the world, Lang said.

Several commentators have expressed broad agreement with Lang’s analysis.

Professor Frank Xie at the University of South Carolina, Aiken, said that the idea of China going bankrupt isn't far fetched.  Major construction projects -- such as Ghost Malls where no one shops and high speed trains to nowhere -- have helped inflate the GDP, he says. “On the surface, it is a big number, but inflation is even higher. So in reality, China’s economy is in recession.”

Further, Xie said that official figures shouldn’t be relied on. The regime’s vice premier, Li Keqiang for example, admitted to a U.S. diplomat that he doesn’t believe the statistics produced by lower-level officials, and when he was the governor of Liaoning Province “had to personally see the hard data.”

Cheng Xiaonong, an economist and former aide to ousted Party leader Zhao Ziyang, said that high praise of the “China model” is often made on the basis of the high-visibility construction projects, a big GDP, and much money in foreign reserves. “They pay little attention to things such as whether people’s basic rights are guaranteed, or their living standard has improved or not,” he said.

Behind the fiat control of the economy, which can have the appearance of being efficient, there is enormous waste and corruption, Cheng said. It means that little spending is done on education, welfare, the health system, etc.

Cheng says that for the last decade the Chinese regime has accumulated its wealth primarily by promoting real estate development, buying urban and suburban residential properties at low prices (or simply taking them), and selling them to developers at high prices.

According to Cheng, the goals of regime officials (to enrich themselves and increase their power) are in direct conflict with those of the people – so social injustice expands, and economic propaganda meant to portray the situation as otherwise prevails.

Few scholars inside the country dare to speak as Lang has, Cheng said. And that’s probably because he has a professorship in Hong Kong.

The upshot -- says FM Duckster -- is that we knew all along from basic free market economics that socialism and communism doesn't work and so why are we not surprised to hear that the Chinese Communist economy ain't all it has been cracked up to be by the Western drive-by news media?  It's not nice to try and fool Mother Nature or Father Economics.

--  Tue Nov 08  Sound money is a basic human right, derived from private property rights.  Alasdair Macloed says it best:  "Firstly, it is a basic human right to choose to save without our savings being debased by the tax of monetary inflation. Those who are worst affected by this inflation tax are not the rich -- they benefit -- but the poor and the barely well-off, which is why monetary inflation undermines society and why the right to sound money should be respected. If government gives itself a monopoly over money, it has a duty to protect the property rights vested in it.

"Secondly, it is a basic right for us to own our own money rather than have it owned by the banks. For them to take our money and expand credit on the back of it debases it. It is an abuse of an individual's property rights and a banking licence is a government licence to do so. If anyone else was to do this, they would be guilty of fraud. Banks should be custodians of our money, and it should not appear in their balance sheets as their property."

"How ironic and sad, then, that advocates of recognizing gold and silver as money, as was done in not-so-olden times, should be characterized as conservatives, reactionaries, and worse when they are actually liberators and when advocates of infinitely 'elastic' currency are actually the great enablers of totalitarianism throughout the world.

"Sound money guarantees a stable yet progressive economy where people are truly equal. It allows people to save properly for their retirement so that they will not become a burden on the state. It leads to democracy voting for small governments. It encourages peaceful trade and discourages war. It is the only path, after this mess, that leads us to long-lasting and peaceful prosperity. We really need everyone to understand this for the sake of our future."

-- Thur Sep 08  When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men... they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it. – Frederic Bastiat, The Law [1850]  Sound familiar in 2011?  Look around.

U of Idaho Wallace pleads GUILTY in $136 mil University Place fiasco...

25% Off Boise's Watergate book
available @ Random House Xlibris Bookstore
Soft Cover Was $20.99 Now $15.99
Hard Cover Was $30.99 Now $22.99

Deep Throat, Deep Throat II, Deepest Throat...how many damn Deep Throats are there in Idaho anyway?

About the author...I was born at the Alamo.  Then we moved to Japan.  Then to California, where I learned the dirty bop.  Attended UC Berkeley.  Got drafted into the Army.  Worked for the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, in the Pentagon and Saigon, Vietnam...in a steel vault two feet thick with cipher locks.  Top Secret Crypto Eyes Only security clearance.  Cranked up four corporations.  Managed Pacific Northwest branch of  a NY Software Company.  Moved to Boise, Idaho.  I'm an investigative journalist writing under a fake name.  Nobody would name their kid "Deep."  And no, my last name is not "Throat."  I dig up dirty laundry.  Dirty political laundry.  On the QT.  Hush-hush.  It's a dirty job, long hours and the pay stinks.  But it's a living and there's lots of dirty political laundry in Idaho.  I lean over a lot of fences, drink a lot of Rocket Java, and listen through beer mugs pressed against bathroom walls.  Right now I'm on my way down to check out another dead body at the Idaho State Legislature.  I better be careful...or it might be my own. -- Deep Throat II   Contact author

What they're saying about Boise's Watergate:

"Of course it was a fix.  It's an incestuous mess." -- Senator Stan Hawkins (R-Ucon), 18-year veteran legislator who voted NO on the University Place fiasco

"You are on the right track.  But you need deeper background.  I have it.  I know where every skeleton is buried.  But I need deepest cover.  You cannot reveal anything about me, not even where or how or by what means you obtain info from me.  Zip, zilch, zero, nada.  You must protect this source even if a judge threatens to send you to jail for contempt." -- Deepest Throat, anonymous source

"Finally, someone with the brains and guts enough to connect the dots between the $100 million Ada County Court House scam and the $136 million University Place fiasco as one big crime spree against the taxpayers by the Boise lawyers, politicians, and Cryptic Partners.  A fast read, this book deserves to become a best seller." -- Sharon Ullman, Ada County Commissioner (2001-2003, 2009-2012)

     Table of Contents    

Chapter  1 - The Cookie Monsters
Chapter  2 - All The Governor's Men
Chapter  3 - Cryptic Partners
Chapter  4 - Shark Frenzy:  Give-Us-Your-Purses
Chapter  5 - Holy Eureka, It's "Hoover Time!"
Chapter  6 - UI and UIF Cookie Jars
Chapter  7 - Nolo Conflicto?
Chapter  8 - Governor's Legislative Dog & Pony Show
Chapter  9 - Boise's Watergate
Chapter 10 - ISBA Throws Monkey Wrench at UIF
Chapter 11 - UIF fires Cryptic Partners for $18 mil?  Excuuse Me?
Chapter 12 - Whistle Blower Winstead
Chapter 13 - Follow The Money
Chapter 14 - "Absolute Power Corrupts"

-------------

Green?
 Did somebody
 say Green?

   Drive the
 ultimate in Green cars.
  Drive the all-electric Tesla sports car.  Zero emissions, zero fossil fuels, and zero carbon footprint.  Well, as close to zero as you can get.  0 to 60 in 4 sec flat.  Beats the crap out of  Corvette, Ferrari, Porsche,  Testaroonie-whatevers and the space shuttle.  Go Green.  Vrooooommmm... off in a cloud of, well, electrons...

-------------

Breaking the
Demopublican Monopoly
How to Unify the Political Right with a Third Party that Can Win

By Nelson Hultberg

New Revised Edition, 112 pgs., $11.95

   We are taught in school that the strength of the American political system lies in the fact that we have a "two-party process." This is akin to teaching that babies come from storks. It is a fairy tale we spin out to avoid messy details of reality we prefer not to face.

   The reality is that America is now a one-party state. The Democratic and Republican parties have become nothing but two divisions of the same party -- the Central Leviathan Party. No matter who wins, we always get more spending, more taxes, more inflation, more bureaucracies, more wars, and LESS FREEDOM.

    Previous National News   

Obama Offers Israeli PM Pork Chops Laced with Cyanide

(May 20, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Whoa, girl friends, pull up the barn floor, shut up, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.

   President Barack Obama yesterday invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dinner at the White House and served him a hot dish of cyanide.  "Yo, dude, welcome to America.  Here, drink this glass of spiked Kool-Aid," slap, slap, right across the face.

   What did Obama do?

   He jumped onto national TV yesterday while PM Netanyahu boarded his plane from Israel for the US and announced that HE, Obama, thinks Israel should recapitulate all the Israeli real estate from the 1967 10-day War against the Arabs -- who tried to annihilate the Jews -- and bulldoze all the Israeli houses back to pre-1967 boundaries.

   Meanwhile, Obama's modest school board acquaintances, Mr. & Mrs. Ayers from the terrorist Weather Underground fame who blew up police stations and the Pentagon in the 1970s, are piloting a flotilla of pro-Palestinian fanatics toward Israel to protest the existence of the Israeli nation.

   Also meanwhile, President Obama is shoveling billions of dollars of US taxpayer money as "foreign aid" -- yeah, "foreign aid," ha-ha -- to various Middle Eastern nations that are gunning down their own citizens, money that will surely go to the Muslim Brotherhood Islamo-fanatics for military arms and supplies so they can take over their respective nations -- which are coincidentally all rioting in unison -- so the Islamo-fanatics can create a Caliphate.  No, Martha, that's not a new decaf drink from body builders in California.  A Caliphate is the Islamo-fanatics' vision of their Fairytale religion's idea of Paradise on Planet Earth, where the men get to beat women into submission.

   Unfortunately, all of the Earth's major religions are...  More...

Budget cuts are meaningless without Federal Reserve transparency

by Rep Ron Paul
Annotated by FM Duck

Apr 19, 2011

"...two very well-connected Wall Street wives got together and formed a real estate investment company that garnered $220 million in so-called "loans" (free money) from the Fed [during the 2008 financial crisis stimulus money bailout].  Compare this number to the $352 million in spending cuts the CBO says are in the current budget [the real amount, not the fake $38 billion in cuts that both political parties and President Obama argued about]!  A few months later, one of the wives bought a $13.5 million personal residence with her husband, the CEO of Morgan Stanley."

"The unelected, unaccountable Fed hands out as much or more money this way as our federal government spends, and yet receives hardly any attention.  This is why I believe transparency of the Fed is a critical step to regaining control of our financial situation in this country.  We can never get meaningful reforms if all eyes are on the $352 million so-called cuts, and transactions like the $220 million given to Wall Street cronies are done in the shadows."

Washington, DC – Congress focused on issues surrounding government spending this week as talk of deficits, the national debt, and the debt limit saturated the airwaves.  This is a positive development.  In years past, there was very little concern over how much was spent here in Washington, how it was spent, or how much of our gross domestic product was being consumed by government.  That blissful ignorance naturally resulted in decades of government spending with impunity, bringing us to where we are today: trillions in debt with astronomical entitlement obligations that will be impossible to fulfill in the not too distant future.  So it is a good thing that there is so much political pressure now on our leaders to actually put the brakes on runaway spending.

However, even the most generous estimate of the spending cut passed this week – $38.5 billion – is a paltry 3.5% of the $1.05 trillion in spending through the next 5 months.  This hardly makes a dent in our government's mountain of debt.  Even worse than that, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stripped away the accounting sleights of hand and scored it as only $352 million in cuts, which works out to less than half of one percent of spending.  More...

A Union Education...or
What Wisconsin reveals about public workers and political power

by The WSJ editors

Mar 01, 2011

Madison, WI – The raucous Wisconsin debate over collective bargaining may be ugly at times, but it has been worth it for the splendid public education. For the first time in decades, Americans have been asked to look under the government hood at the causes of runaway spending. What they are discovering is the monopoly power of government unions that have long been on a collision course with taxpayers. Though it arrived in Madison first, this crack-up was inevitable.

   We first started running the nearby chart on the trends in public and private union membership many years ago. It documents the great transformation in the American labor movement over the latter decades of the 20th century. A movement once led by workers in private trades and manufacturing evolved into one dominated by public workers at all levels of government but especially in the states and cities.

   The trend is even starker if you go back a decade earlier. In 1960, 31.9% of the private work force belonged to a union, compared to only 10.8% of government workers. By 2010, the numbers had more than reversed, with 36.2% of public workers in unions but only 6.9% in the private economy.

   The sharp rise in public union membership in the 1960s and 1970s coincides...  More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 3 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Feb 03, 2011

"11.  Is "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" a moral principle?"

"12.  Does the motive change the nature of a dictatorship?"

11. Is "The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number" A Moral Principle?

“The greatest good for the greatest number" is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of "the good" in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory. But, you might say, the majority in all these examples did not achieve any real good for itself either? No. It didn't, because "the good" is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

The unthinking assumes that every man who mouths this slogan places himself unselfishly with the smaller number to be sacrificed to the greatest number of others. Why should he? There is nothing in the slogan to make him do this. He is much more likely to try to get in with the greatest number, and start sacrificing others. What the slogan actually tells him is that he has no choice, except to rob or be robbed, to crush or get crushed.

The depravity of this slogan lies in the implication that "the good" of a majority must be achieved through the suffering of a minority; that the benefit of one man depends upon the sacrifice of another.

If we accept the Collectivist doctrine that man exists only for the sake of others, then it is true that every pleasure he enjoys (or every bite of food) is evil and immoral if two other men want it. But on this basis men cannot eat, breathe or love (all of that is selfish, and what if two other men want your wife?), men cannot live together at all, and can do nothing except end up by exterminating one another.

Only on the basis of individual rights can any good -- private or public -- be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake -- neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others -- only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.

Do not think that the opposite of "the greatest good for the greatest number" is "the greatest good for the smallest number." The real opposite is: the greatest good one can achieve by one’s own free effort, to everyone living.

If you are an Individualist and wish to preserve the American way of life, ... More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 2 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Feb 02, 2011

"7.  How do we determine that a right has been violated?"

"8.  What is the proper function of government?"

"9.  Can there be a "mixed" social system?"

"10.  Can a society exist without a moral principle?"

7. How Do We Determine That a Right Has Been Violated?

A right cannot be violated except by physical force. One man cannot deprive another of his life nor enslave him, nor forbid him to pursue happiness, except by using force against him. Whenever a man is made to act without his own free, personal, individual, voluntary consent, his right has been violated.

Therefore, we can draw a clear-cut division between the rights of one man and those of another.  It is an objective division, not subject to differences of opinion, nor to majority decision, nor to the arbitrary decree of society. NO MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO INITIATE THE USE OF PHYSICAL FORCE AGAINST ANOTHER MAN.

The practical rule of conduct in a free society, a society of Individualism, is simple and clear-cut: you cannot expect or demand any action from another man, except through his free, voluntary consent.

Do not be misled on this point by an old collectivist trick which goes like this: (1) There is no absolute freedom anyway, since you are not free to murder, (2) society limits your freedom when it does not permit you to kill, (3) therefore, society holds the right to limit your freedom in any manner it sees fit, (4) therefore, drop the delusion of freedom, and (5) freedom is whatever society decides it is.

It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill, but the inalienable individual right of another man to live. This is not a "compromise" between two rights, but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society, but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society, but is implicit in the definition of your own right.

Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.

8. What Is the Proper Function of Government?

The proper function of government is to protect the individual rights of man; this means to protect man against brute force.

In a proper social system, men do not use force against one another.  Force may be used only in self-defense, that is, in defense of a right violated by force. Men delegate to the government the power to use force in retaliation, and only in retaliation.

The proper kind of government does not initiate the use of force. It uses...  More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 1 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Jan 29, 2011

"1.  What is the basic issue in the world today?"

"2.  What is a social system?"

"3.  What is the basic principle of America?"

"4.  What is a right?"

"5.  What are the inalienable rights of man?"

"6.  How do we recognize one another's rights?"

1. What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?

The basic issue in the world today is between two principles:  Individualism and Collectivism.

Individualism holds that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men. Therefore, each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.

Collectivism holds that man has no rights; that his work, his body and his personality belong to the group; that the group can do with him as it pleases, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of whatever it decides to be its own welfare. Therefore, each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group.

These two principles are the roots of two opposite social systems. The basic issue of the world today is between these two systems.

2. What Is a Social System?

   A social system is a code of laws which men observe in order to live together. Such a code must have a basic principle, a starting point, or it cannot be devised. The starting point is the question: Is the power of society limited or unlimited?

   Individualism answers: The power of society is limited by the inalienable, individual rights of man. Society may make only such laws as do not violate these rights.

   Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.

   Example: Under a system of Individualism, a million men cannot pass a law to kill one man for their own benefit. If they go ahead and kill him, they are breaking the law--which protects his right to life-and they are punished.

   Under a system of Collectivism, a million men (or anyone claiming to represent them) can pass a law to kill one man (or any minority), whenever they think they would benefit by his death. His right to live is not recognized.

   Under Individualism, it is illegal to kill the man and it is legal for him to protect himself. The law is on the side of a right. Under Collectivism, it is legal for the majority to kill a man and it is illegal for him to defend himself. The law is on the side of a number.

   In the first case, the law represents a moral principle.

   In the second case, the law represents the idea that there are no moral principles, and men can do anything they please, provided there are enough of them.

   Under a system of Individualism, men are equal before the law at all times. Each has the same rights, whether he is alone or has a million others with him.

   Under a system of Collectivism, men have to gang up on one another and whoever has the biggest gang at the moment, holds all rights, while the loser (the individual or the minority) has none. Any man can be an absolute master or a helpless slave, according to the size of his gang.

   An example of the first system: The United States of America. (See: The Declaration of Independence.)

   An example of the second system: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany [and President Obama’s America today in 2011].

   Under the Soviet system, millions of peasants or "kulaks" were exterminated...  More...

Toward Sensible Monetary Policy

By Rep Ron Paul (R-TX)

Jan 15, 2011

Washington, DC – Last week the 112th Congress was sworn in.  I am pleased that I will be chairing the Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee, which has oversight of the Federal Reserve.  Obviously, this position will facilitate my efforts to ensure the Fed provides the American people with more information about what they have been doing with and to our money.  Not surprisingly, since my chairmanship was announced, apologists for the Fed have been recycling the old canard about how increased transparency threatens the Fed’s so-called political independence.

   By independence, they are referring to the Fed’s ability to greatly impact the economy with virtually no meaningful oversight.  We only recently learned that the bankers at the Fed were able to use the latest financial crisis to bail out Wall Street cronies and foreign central banks with billions of dollars that were created and wasted, instead of appropriated and voted on by representatives of the people.  The Fed and its supporters in Congress vehemently fought even this small bit of transparency and without this one-time provision in the financial reform act forcing disclosure, we would still not have this information.  Indeed, we are in the dark on so much of what the Fed has done.  This is extremely dangerous for our country, yet this power and secrecy is defended as some kind of public good, which is patently ridiculous.

   Our government is based on a system of checks and balances.  With no check on the Fed, it is no surprise it has thrown the economy...  More...

Reduce Bush Tax Cuts, don't keep it the samo-samo

Dec 18, 2010

Washington, DC -- So... what's wrong with the Obama Bush Tax Cut Bill that the U.S. House and Senate just passed yesterday and that Obama promises to sign immediately?  Think about it.  Relative to our current government spending and deficit in today's economy, the new Bill does not, on net, cut any taxes whatsoever, not even the Soc Sec payroll taxes because they must be made up with further deficits, interest on that deficit, and more taxation to pay for it.  We already, in 2010, have the Bush tax cuts and we're still in a Recession.  The only thing that the left Liberal Progressives did -- and some GOP and even Libertarians in Congress -- was to promise that the government would not increase next year some of the taxes we already have this year.  But simultaneously they INCREASED ALL OTHER TAXES, i.e, spending, plus some new spending and taxation.  Analysis.  We should be voting to REDUCE the Bush Tax Cuts, not keeping them the same.  If we are in a current heavy Recession with high unemployment and moving rapidly to hyper-inflation and a huge Depression right now with the current Bush tax cuts, and the government is not changing its spending or tax cuts relative to what we're already doing now, how does anybody interpret that as something different that will help solve the Recession or unemployment?  No change, no difference.  Think about it for a moment.  Our only choice was not to keep the Bush Tax Cuts or let them expire.  The other choice was to further CUT the current Bush Tax Cuts.   All the Administration did was promise that they would not increase the beatings.  We will not be doing anything differently than we are doing now -- and in fact we will be spending lots more and incurring a bigger deficit -- so, therefore, the new Obama Bush Tax "Cut" Bill will do nothing different, and thus how can we expect a different outcome?  Duh, we've been tricked again.  The economy is going to Hell in a hand basket and all we did was promise to continue doing the same thing, plus worse, which isn't working.  A 12-year-old child can see that we just voted to spend more deficit money and increase our taxes in 2011 and 2012 -- just in time for Obama and his thugs to run again for the White House and try to grab the rest of our freedoms from us in their zeal to create another Socialist Kingdom of Equality.  In the new 2011 Robbery, the Death Tax will go up from zero to 35% of estates over $5 million.  Soc Sec taxes are cut from your left pocket and raised as taxes later from your right pocket.  Unemployment extension payments, which are deficits, are increased.  Even from a stupid Keynesian Economic Village Idiot point of view, how does doing more of the same that isn't working, help solve the economy's problems?  What the stupids in Washington voted for was for the government to not go back to beating the people more than it is already beating us.  Wow.  That's really smart.  As in, Hi, you know the fifty lashes everybody received from the feds every day in 2010?  Well, we promise not to increase that to a hundred lashes every day in 2011 like we used to do in the past.  Whew!  Goodie-goodie gum drops, you idiots.  The better action for the GOP and Libertarians -- which is why Libertarians always lose elections, year after year, -- would have been to vote NO on the Obama Bush Tax Cuts and let the left Liberal Progressives take the hit for passing this pernicious Bill all by themselves, or if the GOP could have swung it, stop the Bill from passing altogether.  Then, next Jan 2011, the majority GOP and Libertarians could pass REAL tax cuts, REAL deficit cuts, REAL spending cuts by introducing each line item of the Obama Bill one by one, such as The Death Tax permanently set to zero, no more unemployment extensions, no Soc Sec payroll cuts without offsetting changes to the Soc Sec system for the youth such as a choice of private pensions, etc.  What has happened is that the left Liberal Progressives have scared the Tea Party, the GOP, and the Libertarians into a compromise and anybody who knows anything about debating knows that as soon as you obtain the sanction of your victims and get them to accept your premises, they lose.  And that's exactly what just happened with the Obama Bush Tax Cut Bill yesterday.  Wake up Tea Party and free market capitalists or you will soon be voting for the government to beat you with only 500 lashes per day instead of the 1,000 lashes they threaten you with tomorrow.  It's called extortion.  Either way, you lose.  You need to throw off the yoke of Big Brother and force them to stop beating you at all:  as in zero lashes per day, and stop playing The Relative Taxation and Spending Game.  Promises by thugs to not beat you up tomorrow more than they are beating you up today is not the answer.  Stop the beatings altogether.  Stop the deficits.  Stop the spending.  Stop the Federal Reserve's hyper-inflation.  Period.  Or it will never end -- except in total chaos and the collapse of the dollar.

Rep Ron Paul chosen as Chair of Banking Subcomittee overseeing Fed Reaserve

Dec 14, 2010

Washington, DC -- News Flash-a-roonie, girl friends!  Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has now been chosen as the Chairman of the Banking Subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve.  Yahoo, baby!  As all you red-hot readers of FM Duck already know, Rep Ron Paul has made it his life long passion in Congress to teach everybody about sound monetary principles and free market capitalism.  He is a Libertarian, well-schooled in Austrian free market economics, and has written a great little book entitled, "END The FED."  As Rep Paul has stated:

"The groundswell of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is reflected not only in the rhetoric coming out of Capitol Hill, but also in the tremendous interest shown by the financial press.  The demand for transparency is growing, whether the political and financial establishment likes it or not.  The Fed is losing its vaunted status as an institution that somehow is above politics and public scrutiny.  Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as subcommittee chairman.

Thanks to public pressure earlier this year, Congress did pass legislation that requires the Fed to disclose some information about its bailout of select industries and companies following the 2008 financial crisis.  So two weeks ago the Fed released data concerning more than $3 trillion of assistance it offered to banks through its bailout facilities.  After reviewing this data, however, we are left with many more questions about the Fed's 'lending'.
 
In the 'Term Securities Lending Facility', the Fed was supposed to have loaned against AAA-rated securities -- yet over half of the collateral put up by banks to obtain loans had no listed credit rating. Should we assume that the Fed accepted absolute junk rated securities as collateral for loans?  Presumably these securities were so bad that they wouldn’t even publicize their credit rating.  So why should our central bank, backed up by your taxes, accept such collateral?
 
On another note, of the $1.25 trillion purchased under the Fed’s 'Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program,' only $877 billion in purchases have been publicized. What happened to the remaining $400 billion?
 
These kinds of limited disclosures by the Fed only underscore the need for a full and complete audit of the Fed’s financial books.  This audit should be done by an independent third party, in the same manner that public companies are audited.  The Fed should make public its balance sheet, income statement, and perhaps most importantly its cash flow statement.  It also should publicize the notes explaining those financial statements.

We seem to forget sometimes that Congress created the Fed -- it is a government-created banking monopoly, and its top decision-makers are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. If the Fed does not perform satisfactorily in the eyes of these politicians and their constituents, the Chairman and Governors may not be re-nominated.

In theory, Congress could even repeal the Federal Reserve Act altogether since it has the authority to do so.  Obviously Congress is within its authority to audit an organization it created by statute, and it is time to assume that responsibility. 
 
With 320 Members of Congress cosponsoring my legislation to fully audit the Fed in the 111th Congress, my hope is that we can build on our broad bipartisan coalition in 2011 and continue the push for greater Fed transparency going forward."

Today's economists are not economists...they are socialists who are busy modeling historical prices of potatoes

Dec 13, 2010

Washington, DC -- Today's Recession is due to a totally fallacious basic theory of socialist "economics."  Almost all the "economists" coming out of school today aren't actually economists.  An economist is someone who describes the way the world works.  True economics is the study of subjective human action, not quantitative differential calculus.  But these people – the Fed Reserve's Chief Ben Bernanke being a perfect example – aren't interested in describing the way it works. Rather, they want to prescribe the way they want it to work, and then get the state to enforce their views on society.  The state, of course, welcomes such advice when it serves its agenda.  Bernanke has a high IQ, but he's just an uninteresting and unoriginal suit.  He grew up with the reigning orthodoxy, got his Ph.D. in it, taught it, and has been rewarded with the leadership of the world's largest central bank.  But he's not an economist. He's a political apologist.  And, he's now a very confused and scared one.  Perhaps he can see that the ridiculous theories he's grown up believing in are more phony than a Federal Reserve note. But he doesn't dare admit it.  So, we will get more and more of the same:  an unelected private banking corporation controlled by the major Wall Street banks, printing up or digitizing trillions and trillions of pulp fiction dollars on the amazing premise that the injection of paper per se, in and of itself, creates value and wealth.  That's like claiming that if I counterfeit a million copies of the Deed To My House and sell each copy in the market for $1,000, I will somehow have create a billion dollars of wealth, when, in reality, all that exists is one Deed To My House, and a lot of lying pieces of non-contractual paper.  And that, mes amies, is exactly what is going on in our economy by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama.  Eventually, this Ponzi Scheme must collapse and those who traded their goods and services and savings for the fake paper will soon wake up one day and find out when the music stops, they have no chair on which to sit.  And their paper and digitized savings have eroded to ZERO.  I hope you're stocking up on physical gold and silver bullion coins.  And storage food.  And guns and ammo to protect yourselves when the starving masses dash around the burbs and then the suburbs to clean out everybody's pantries.  Think about an alternative energy source.

WikiLeaks, Good or Bad?

Dec 11, 2010

Washington, DC -- WikiLeaks, good or bad?  Here's two different points of view, the first from Libertarian Doug Casey at Casey Gold Reports.  Casey essentially agrees with Rep. Ron Paul, a Libertarian GOP Congressman.  Paraphrasing Doug Casey...  "WikiLeaks has become one of the most important watchdog organizations on the planet, helping to expose a lot of government action for what it really is.  This latest leak of a quarter of a million classified U.S. embassy cables is quite a coup, not just for revealing China's changing attitudes about North Korea, but for exposing discussions the U.S. had with other countries about bombing Iran, espionage conducted by U.S. diplomats in Paraguay, Chinese government attacks on Google, and more mundane things like the lavish lifestyles of Kazakhstan's political elite.  Shining a light on the sociopaths who hide in the dark places under the rocks of government is always a good thing. Just as they recently did in their exposé of what is going on with the counterproductive U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It's great to have a whistleblower organization like them.  Julian Assange, who runs it, is a hero, and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize – although it's a shame that prize has become so meaningless and degraded.  And on a more fundamental philosophical level, this is in keeping with my sense of justice.  Crooks should not get away with their crimes just because they hold lofty titles, wear spiffy uniforms, and call their crimes great deeds necessitated by 'national security,' 'economic stimulus,' or whatever other nonsensical lies they come up with.  The whole idea of 'national security' has gotten completely out of control. It has about zero to do with protecting what little is left of America; it's all about protecting, and building, the U.S. government, and the people who participate in it and profit from it.  People fail to understand that the US Government doesn't represent them, or care about them – or at least not any more than a farmer cares about his milk cows.  It's an entity unto itself at this point. It has its own interests, which have only an accidental or coincidental overlap with those of America.  Government is by its very nature duplicitous and predatory; it always puts itself first. By cynically paying lip service to traditional values, and whipping up a nationalistic, patriotic fervor, they can get Boobus americanus to go along with almost anything they propose."  From another perspective, the Glenn Beck perspective, Glenn thinks it's too much of a coincidence that left-leaning socialist WikiLeaks just happened to pop up when Obama's socialist FCC Czar is pulling off a bureaucratic end run around recent rulings of the U.S. Congress and Judicial Branch that said the government cannot implement the Fairness Doctrine -- i.e., shut down all Conservative talk show hosts.  Because of WikiLeaks, according to Glenn Beck, Obama's FCC Czar now has a ready-made National Security Reason to take over the entire Internet and all communications media in the U.S.  What a coinkydink:  WikiLeaks pops up just in time to provide a "reason" for the FCC to take over freedom of speech in America?  Is WikiLeaks a knowing participant of this "conspiracy" against the First Amendment or did they just happen to stumble into it?  Who knows?  The jury is still out.  One thing's for sure.  Sweden's sex charges against WikiLeaks' Julian Assange are totally bogus and were no doubt instigated by the U.S. Government as well as the government goons in other nations to buy time so they can fry his ass for some other ha-ha "national security" reason.  How would you like to jump into the sack with some voluptuous Swedish babe in Stockholm and get arrested because there's a Swedish law against your condom accidentally breaking?  Duh, yeah, Sveden is soooo Progressive, yah?

Meet The 35 Foreign Banks That Got Bailed Out By The Fed

Dec 04, 2010

New York, NY -- One may be forgiven to believe that via its FX liquidity swap lines the Fed only bailed out foreign Central Banks, which in turn took the money and funded their own banks. It turns out that is only half the story: we now know the Fed also acted in a secondary bail out capacity, providing over $350 billion in short term funding exclusively to 35 foreign banks, of which the biggest beneficiaries were UBS, Dexia and BNP. Since the funding provided was in the form of ultra-short maturity commercial paper it was essentially equivalent to cash funding. In other words, between October 27, 2008 and August 6, 2009, the Fed spent $350 billion in taxpayer funds to save 35 foreign banks. And here people are wondering if the Fed will ever allow stocks to drop: it is now more than obvious that with all banks leveraging the equity exposure to the point where a market decline would likely start a Lehman-type domino, there is no way that the Brian Sack-led team of traders will allow stocks to drop ever... Until such time nature reasserts itself, the market collapses without GETCO or the PPT being able to catch it, and the Fed is finally wiped out in one way or another. 

The 35 companies in question:

UBS
Dexia SA
BNP Paribas
Barclays PLC
Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Commerzbank AG
Danske Bank A/S
ING Groep NV
WestLB
Handelsbanken
Deutsche Post AG
Erste Group Bank AG
NordLB
Free State of Bavaria
KBC
HSH Nordbank AG
Unicredit
HSBC Holdings PLC
DZ Bank AG
Republic of Korea
Rabobank
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
Banco Espirito Santo SA
Bank of Nova Scotia
Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd.
Syngenta AG
Mitsui & Co Ltd
Bank of Montreal
Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
Shinhan Financial Group Co Ltd
Mitsubishi Corp
Aegon NV
Royal Bank of Canada
Sumitomo Corp  by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge dot.com

And this is why the Fed Reserve doesn't want to be audited by Congress.  Because it would reveal that the Fed has not only been illegally bailing out foreign banks, they have also been illegally leasing America's gold to foreign nations to earn profits for themselves.  That's why this year's Banking Reform Bill signed off by President Obama purposefully omitted Rep. Ron Paul's initial Audit The Fed requirements that would have forced the Fed would undergo a full audit every year.  Congress and the Federal Reserve are robbing the American citizens blind by going off the gold standard, counterfeiting, our pulp fiction dollars, and bailing out their banking buddies throughout the entire world.  Who says crime doesn't pay?  Time to abolish the Fed.

No Price Inflation?  Really?

Dec 11, 2010

Washington, DC – Yo, social security recipients.  Social Security is not welfare -- at least not for most of the old folks over age 62.  The government forced you and your "employer" under penalty of fines and imprisonment to pay social security over your entire working lifetime.  Those who were self employed, paid double (15%) as the "employee" and the "employer."  Did the Feds invest YOUR Soc Sec money at 5% per year?  Or even 1% per year?  Hell no.  Did they set up a personal retirement account for each Soc Sec individual?  No.  In fact, Congress "borrowed" YOUR Soc Sec money and spent it on other budget crap without paying it back into the Soc Sec trust fund.  So, do they owe it to you to pay YOUR money back to YOU?  You're damned straight they do.  So stop feeling guilty about receiving YOUR money back.  As it currently stands, however, you will NOT receive a cost of living allowance (COLA) for a second year in a row now because Congress and the Feds are lying about the real inflation rate of the goods and services you consume on a daily basis.  Read the following, compiled by Jake Weber, of Casey Gold Research:  “Inflation in the Real World.  As is often the case, there is a big difference between what the government statistics are reporting and what’s going on in the real world.  According to the most recent inflation reading published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), consumer prices grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in August.

The government has an incentive to distort CPI numbers, for reasons such as keeping the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments low.  While there’s no question that you may be able to get a good deal on a new car or a flat-screen TV today, how often are you really buying these things?  When you look at the real costs of everyday life, prices have risen sharply over the last year.  For simplicity’s sake, consider the cash market prices on some basic commodities.

Year-over-year price changes Oct 2010 (source: Casey Research 2010):

Wheat – 74%
Corn – 14%
Oats – 68%
Canola – 36%
Heating Oil – 29%
Gasoline – 25%
Natural Gas – 15%
Beef – 18%
Pork – 60%
Coffee – 27%
Sugar – 44%
Cotton – 66%
Copper – 37%
Gold – 31%
Silver – 36%
Govt’s Lying Consumer Price Index – 1.1% (Aug 2010)

On average, our basic food costs have increased by an incredible 48% over the last year (measured by wheat, corn, oats, and canola prices).  From the price at the pump to heating your stove, energy costs are up 23% on average (heating oil, gasoline, natural gas).  A little protein at dinner is now 39% higher (beef and pork), and your morning cup of coffee with a little sugar has risen by 36% since last October.

You probably aren’t buying new linens or shopping for copper piping at the hardware store every day, but I included these items to show the inflationary pressures on some other basic materials that will likely affect consumer prices down the road.

The jump in gold and silver prices illustrates that it’s not just supply and demand issues driving the precious metals higher – the decline in purchasing power of the dollar is also showing up in the price of physical goods.  It is because stashing wheat and cotton in the garage is an impractical way to protect purchasing power that investors are increasingly looking to protect themselves with the monetary metals – a trend that is now very much in motion.”

545 People

by Charlie Reese

Oct 19, 2010

Washington, DC – Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.  The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress.  In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.  They have no legal authority.

They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.

I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The politician has the power to accept...  More...

Central banks create $4.7 trillion mortgage foreclosure debacle with fractional reserve monetary concepts

Oct 10, 2010

New York, NY – Whoa, girl friends, jump off your side saddles, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Four major U.S. banks, B of A, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup, handle-service-screw-around-with $4.7 trillion, or 70%, of the home mortgage market money that was used as collateral to create investment derivatives such as CDs with fancy sounding names like Super Duper You Bet Safe As Hell Pension Fund 1001 for people to invest their life savings into to earn interest so they can have a retirement pension to live on when they hit age 65.

   Unfortunately, it looks like those Super Duper Pension Funds won’t be there.

   Why?

   Because the basis for the Super Duper Pension Funds, the collapsing value of homes and, thus, the collapsing value of the home mortgages that home owners are supposed to pay to their banks each month, are not being paid.

   Home owners are defaulting on their house payments and either walking away or simply living in their home without making any payments whatsoever.  Home prices are continuing to collapse with no end in sight and Mr. Average Home Buyer ain’t forking over house payments to the banks because (1) he lost his job, and (2) the value of his house is a lot lower than the mortgage balance of his loan.  He is underwater and drowning in debt, debt originally created by our central bank, the Federal Reserve, in a maze of fallacious Economic Wizardry concocted at places like Harvard and Wall Street.

   Time for the banks to foreclose, right?  Wrong.  Why not?  Because if all the banks in the U.S. foreclosed on all the homes that aren’t being paid for and brought those foreclosures onto their accounting books, all the banks in the U.S. would have to declare bankruptcy.  That’s why the Obama Administration and Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are doing nothing to push foreclosures on the American public, besides the fact they can’t physically process that much paperwork in our life time.  Mainly, it would show us how bad off we really are… and, by the way, you know, as an aside, it would cause the entire frickin economy to crash and burn like the economic snow ball from hell that it really is.

   So, what did the above four major Banksta Gangstas do yesterday?  That’s right, they stopped all foreclosures on their $4.7 trillion of home mortgages until they could rearrange the deck chairs and try to tap dance their way off the deck of the sinking Titanic.

   The Bigger question is:  how in hell did we arrive at this point?

   That’s easy.  Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.  We got to here by adopting the same concepts and absurd economic principles as the central bankers adopted for creating paper money and credit out of thin air with no real collateral.  It’s called:  fractional reserve banking, in which the banks issue more debt, more paper I.O.U.s, more non-backed promissory notes, more pulp fiction U.S. Dollars than the hard commodity collateral for which the legal tender notes are supposed to represent.  In short, the central banking bastards have been legally counterfeiting our money with the full knowledge and consent of Congress so they can spend tons of money they don’t have like drunken sailors on shore leave.  It’s called a “stimulus.”  It used to be called “counterfeiting.”

   Let’s get down and dirty and put it in "street talk." ...  More...

Obama's Three Economic Fallacies...or,
Why He Doesn't Get It

Oct 1, 2010

Washington, DC – Has anybody else noticed a consistent theme running through President Obama's ideology of state collectivism through which he is attempting to "fundamentally transform America?"  There are three basic economic fallacies uponst which rest Obama's ridiculous programs:

Economic Fallacy # 1:  Wealth is finite,
Economic Fallacy # 2:  Value resides in labor per se, and
Economic Fallacy # 3:  Money is non-collateralized paper or credit.

   Let's blow apart these three fallacies.

   (1) Wealth is not finite.  Wealth is infinite and is the result of...  More...

Energy - Part 3 of 3

Why Are We Still Drilling for Oil When We Have Tesla’s Free Radiant Energy?

(Sep 18, 2010)

In 1943, JP Morgan Jr. et al. murdered Nikola Tesla.  The feds tried to cover it up as “natural causes” but the New York coroner’s report lists Tesla’s cause of death as “poison.”

In the 1890’s, JP Morgan Sr. et al. murdered Maxwell’s Equations and Electrical Engineering, killing off Tesla’s discoveries of free wireless energy from “the vacuum of space-time.”  The result is that today, and for the last 100 years, the world has been using dirty fossil fuel or dirty nuclear fission instead of a clean, renewable, almost infinite source of free energy from the “vacuum.”

In 1913, JP Morgan Sr. was one of the central bankers who pushed the U.S. Congress into creating the Federal Reserve so they, the bankers, could control the U.S. money supply and thus all market sectors, especially energy.

Today, in 2010, JP Morgan Co. is one of the four major bullion banks that the President’s Economic Advisors -- aka The Plunge Protection Team -- conspire with to manipulate the buying and selling of precious metals, gold and silver futures in the commodities market, trying to prop up the hyper-inflated Federal Reserve Note.

So, if we connect the dots between all of these manipulations in the energy and monetary sectors by JP Morgan Co. and other special interest groups in Washington DC, we discover that most everything we learned about money, financing, and energy is a series of big fat lies.  And those lies continue to this day in 2010.

“There is enough EFTV energy in one thimbleful of the space time continuum to power every electrical device currently in existence on planet Earth.” -- Tom Bearden.

   One of the men who brought you pulp fiction dollars via a central banking cartel called the Federal Reserve is the same man who bankrupted Nikola Tesla.  The banker’s son then allegedly had Tesla murdered (poisoned) in order to prevent Tesla from (1) disseminating information about his free radiant energy machines, and (2) going to Washington to show President FDR how he could construct a series of energy shields to protect the U.S. from foreign attacks.  That man and his son were JP Morgan Sr. and JP Morgan Jr., respectively, the same Morgans who co-founded General Electric Co. with Thomas Edison.  Their purpose?  To prevent Tesla from competing against Morgan’s new oil business.

   JP Morgan elicited the services of physicist H.A. Lorentz to re-gauge (alter) Maxwell’s Equations at the turn of the 20th century regarding the source of Electro Magnetic energy available in electrical circuits.  This was done in order to hide the fact that Maxwell showed how one could pull a trillion times more energy from the active space-time medium (the vacuum) in a standard electrical circuit than the puny amount of electron energy we currently use today.

   Lorentz's “symmetricized” Maxwell’s Equations were changed to convince the 30 or so electro-dynamicists (electrical engineers) of the day that no excess energy was being pulled from the seething EM “vacuum.”  This charade was continued by shoving the changed equations into university text books after the early 1900s, which is where they sit today, rotting the brains of current EE students who, of course, just memorize crap for their tests and ask no further questions.  Nothing has changed over the last 100 years and what today’s Electrical Engineers (EE’s) learn at all major universities are the erroneously “symmetrical” Maxwell Equations created (re-gauged) precisely to hide the huge amount of free energy available from space because JP Morgan’s Big Oil cartel would have been bankrupted by this information about free energy from the vacuum.

   The upshot is that anybody who goes back and questions the original equations – not likely, and not many -- and discovers the discrepancies is either ridiculed or run out of EE grad school.  Meanwhile, down the hall in the Physics Dept, physicists are busy winning Nobel Prizes for showing the “extra” Maxwell Equation Poynting and Heaviside radiant energy streaming into standard EE circuits that EE majors are taught to purposely ignore...  More...

Energy - Part 2 of 3

The Asteroid Belt and How It Got There after the Planet Phaeton Blew Up...Will History Repeat Itself?

(July 9th, 2010)

The Asteroid Belt is what remained of planet Phaeton (aka Malona or Malon) after it exploded during a great civil war in which the Malonans induced tremendous quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano which triggered the cosmic catastrophe, approximately 75,000 years ago. – as explained by ET human Semjase in Guido Moosbrugger’s book And Still They Fly

Washington, DC – What does the current BP oil spill have in common with today’s Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter?  Read on.

   75,000 years ago, the planets of our solar system were arranged in the following order outward from the Sun:  Mercury, Earth with its Moon, Phaeton (Malona), Mars, no Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus with its moons (one of which, 10,000 years ago, was ripped out of orbit by the gravity of a passing Destroyer Comet and then moved into orbit around the Sun as Venus), Neptune, Pluto, Transpluto, and Uni.  Transpluto has already been discovered by Earth scientists, Uni has not but it will be.

   Take the following as a given, I will quote sources later:  we are not alone in our universe and there exist many universes in many dimensions at various levels of evolution.  “Not alone” means the existence of both ET humans and ET non-humans, all at various stages of evolution.  Relevant to our discussion about energy, suffice it to say that the planet Phaeton (or Malona) and Mars were both populated by ET humans many thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of which had immigrated from other galaxies and solar systems to our solar system for various reasons, some of which were political.  This is not science fiction; this is for real.  The inhabitants of Malona were not without their own internal social and political intrigues, just like humans on planet Earth today.

  Sources claim the Malonans duked it out over who knows what trivial piece of political crap – just like Earth humans today -- but the major point for our energy discussion is how they blew themselves up.

   It seems like the dummies on Malona got carried away in their civil war and directed huge quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano, causing a super volcanic explosion that eventually blew their planet into many chunks that now populate our solar system as what we call The Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.  Only a few individuals escaped from Malona.  They made their way to Earth, mingling with the indigenous humans.  That was 75,000 years ago.

   When Melona blew the first chunk of its planet into space, the larger portion of the planet moved into Mars’ orbit where, in subsequent explosions, Malona finally blew itself to nothing except solar rubble orbiting the Sun, the majority of which is now known on Earth as The Asteroid Belt, orbiting around our Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  After the last explosions, Mars moved into Malona’s previous orbit leaving an orbital gap between Mercury and Earth, perhaps due to the gravitational force of Mars and The Asteroid Belt pulling toward Jupiter and opening that slot.  In fact, 65,000 years later (10,000 years ago), Venus (originally a moon of Uranus) moved into this gap, its present orbit, as the 2nd rock from the Sun.  Interestingly, the Earth exhibited such a strong gravitational force on Uranus’ displaced moon, soon-to-be Venus, as it moved from Uranus past Earth and eventually captured between Mercury and Earth, that it slowed Venus’ rotation and orbit around the Sun into retrograde – which means opposite the rotation and orbit of all the other planets in our solar system.

   In short, The Asteroid Belt is what remained of planet Phaeton (aka Malona or Malon) after it exploded during their great civil war, in which the Malonans [stupidly] induced tremendous quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano which triggered the cosmic catastrophe, approximately 75,000 years ago.  (Source:  ET human Semjase in Guido Moosbrugger’s book And Still They Fly www.figu.org)

   And what is the significance of the inhabitants of Phaeton blowing themselves to oblivion and our Earth’s current BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?  More...

Energy - Part 1 of 3

BP’s Quest for Time

The Well from Hell... And What They're Not Saying

by

Christian A. DeHaemer, Editor Energy & Capital

(Friday, June 18th, 2010)

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what, they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame. -- Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

Washington, DC -- There is something primordial about BP's quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It's an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep.

   I don't know if you've stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do...

   The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That's the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim.  And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that -- Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare.

   Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed.

   It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas -- the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people.

   More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane.  According to the New York Times, BP's internal "documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of 'well control.'  And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.”

   The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure.  Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi -- far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff valves and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi.  It was an accident waiting to happen.  And there are many that say it could get worse -- much worse.

   Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

   According to CNN:

   The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May.  And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles.  Some geologists say that BP's arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into a deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

Need the Mudlogs

   Geologist Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored.  So far, no one has seen them.  BP keeps them hidden.

   Mr. Landau claims:

   It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

   What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mud weight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky.

   But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work.

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn't fallen off

   In fact... it's increased.

   The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano.

   I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

   Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi.  Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.  These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.  That said, a bubble this large -- if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack -- would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens... only under water.  More...

America: a walking dead-zombie country

By

Von Lars Schall at www.Chaostheorien, Germany

Friday, Aug 20, 2010

“The most revealing aspect of the BP oil spill was that it showed to the world that America currently has no President.  At least with Bush you knew where he stood.  I believe with Obama there is nobody home.  He is a ghost.  He doesn’t do anything.  He is a Manchurian Candidate, he is a robot, he is nothing.  He has done nothing, he is doing nothing, he will never do anything.  Obama is just waiting to get a job at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan in three or four year’s time and that’s it.  The White House is a way to improve his resume.  The BP oil spill revealed that America is running with no leadership at all.  There is nobody at the helm of the ship.  It’s running wild with no leadership whatsoever.”

The high-profile financial pundit Max Keiser doesn’t shy away from crystal-clear, unmistakable statements. The following exclusive interview is no exception. Mr. Keiser sees an attack exercised against the majority of people in the U.S., sets out why gold is in no bubble at all, points at a remarkable move by the Harvard University, and has an advice to some US-American billionaires disguised as noble philanthropists: “Just pay your taxes and shut up!”

Mr. Keiser, in your initial email you wrote to me:

“The key to understanding the current situation is to understand that house prices, jobs, wages, and pensions in the US are all being attacked with original-issue debt dollar junk.

This will continue until the middle class has been completely wiped out.”

Can you elaborate on this, please?

Yes, it’s a Financial Holocaust. It is designed to destroy the American middle-class. We face an original-issue deflation, if you will. It is as if Michael Milken ran the Fed. If you look at the work of Steve Keen (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/), an economist in Australia and one of a very few economists who got the crisis of the past three years accurate, you understand that the banking system does not work on a system where deposits are the basis for fractional reserve. The banking system works on the basis of loans used as the collateral for more loans.

That means that the origination of all the fractional reserve lending that is going on is just more debt. There are no retail deposit reserves or wholesale deposit reserves, just original issue dollar based junk debt. And when you understand that debt is at the bottom of the pyramid and that there’s no equity at all, or capital as this term is usually understood, then you understand that the banks and the policy makers are continuing a programme at the behest of Wall Street to commit a Financial Holocaust to eliminate the majority in America, which is the middle-class. Wall Street banks with their CDS's, High Frequency Trading and bogus market making are injecting the equivalent of financial Zyklon B into the American and world economy.

With regard to the U.S. economy, would you agree with Paul Krugman, who wrote not a long time ago that the lights in the U.S. are about to go out?[1]

Paul Krugman is a salon monkey. You can quote me on that.

Okay, no problem (laughs).

He is a tool of the New York Times. If it wasn’t for the New York Times, no one would read Paul Krugman. He has absolutely nothing credible to say. He is merely a mouthpiece for neo-liberal clap-trap. Any minute you spend reading Paul Krugman is a minute of your life that you’ll never get back.

How does the mainstream media -- not only in the U.S., but in the Western hemisphere in general -- play its part to ascertain its recipients that everything is more or less alright?

Well, the mainstream media is owned by the banking system. There is no widely disseminated media-outlet that is not owned by the banking system. Every media-outlet in the United States – Fox News, CNN, The New York Times etc. – is an extension of CNBC and James Cramer.

How do you feel in this context about the attempts to regulate the internet?

It’s a sad chapter in American history, because the internet came into being as the result of the good will of the American taxpayer. Now you have private corporations like Google and Verizon, who are stealing it. That’s unconscionable. It’s a hanging offense. If there would be any justice, the principles of Google and Verizon would be strung up and beaten.

Will those attempts have bad effects for the journalism that’s going on in the internet?

Yes.

What is your take on the “Financial Reform Act” that passed Congress a few weeks ago? Does it deserve its name?

No. I’ve talked with Bill Black about this and he made all the salient points: it’s purely cosmetic, does nothing to address the structural problems and is dead on arrival.[2]

You’ve already mentioned the problem of deflation. The Federal Reserve tries to fix this problem, allegedly, with a new round of quantitative easing. Will this not make everything worse?

Well, getting back to the original question: the Fed can only issue debt. So they’re trying to fix the debt-deflation problem by issuing more debt. Whatever drugs Ben Bernanke is on, he should either take less, take more or change his prescription.

Related to the deflation in the U.S., More...

Carbs against Cardio
  by
Melinda Wenner Moyer
Scientific American – Medicine & Health – May 2010 Issue
(June 03, 2010)

More data that refined carbohydrates, not fats, threaten the heart. – Melinda Moyer

And this is precisely why the free market should rule in health care (and in all other commodities and services), not the government, because if the government is wrong we have no freedom of recourse to correct our errors, only an immovable bureaucracy cast in stone. – FM Duck

New York, NY – Eat less saturated fat:  that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years.  But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer.  Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why:  investigators may have picked the wrong culprit.  Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does – a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

   In March the American Journal of clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis – which combines data from several studies – that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years.  The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

   The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter...  More...

$145 Billion and Counting

By Wall Street Journal Op Ed
(May 11, 2010)

New York, NY -- Fannie Mae yesterday announced its 11th consecutive quarterly loss—$11.5 billion—and asked for another $8.4 billion in taxpayer assistance. When it comes to losing money, nobody does it better than this government-created mortgage investor.

  Fannie Mae is the Cal Ripken of bad real-estate deals, reliably pouring taxpayer money into the housing market. Granted, Fannie faces tough competition from its toxic twin, Freddie Mac, which last week announced its own request for another $10.6 billion from taxpayers.

  Once the checks from Treasury clear, Fan and Fred will have consumed a combined $145 billion in taxpayer cash, and the end is nowhere in sight. Both companies warned of further losses triggering more government assistance, which is now unlimited after a 2009 Treasury decision.

  The losses are unlimited because the companies are now run by the government not to make money, by deliberately subsidizing housing. In yesterday's press release, CEO Mike Williams didn't even pretend that he's running a profit-making business. "In the first quarter we continued to serve as a leading source of liquidity to the mortgage market, and we made solid progress in our ongoing efforts to keep people in their homes," he said. These efforts to support the Obama anti-foreclosure program resulted in...More...

Our World Balances On a Sea of Debt

Mar 06, 2010
by
Darius Guppy

“The banks that control the world’s supply of money are no better than counterfeiters – and their systems of juggling debt have left the global economy teetering on the brink of ruin.” -- Darius Guppy, convicted Dutch counterfeiter

The following article aptly describes how fractional reserve banking is simply another form of counterfeiting, pointing out the conceptual difference between (1) real money and (2) a paper receipt for real money.  Then as the counterfeiting by fractional reserve bankers grows exponentially, as it must, the central bankers – witness former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan as he embraces the erroneous concept that he can impute value to paper money per se -- start believing in their own monetary lies and create even more complicated counterfeit investment vehicles backed by nothing but hot air, such as fake mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations based upon non-collateralized future daydreams, and then gambling pieces of paper called Credit Default Swaps whose clever function consists of betting against the previously-created fractional reserve derivatives.  That’s like a counterfeiter soliciting bets that the cops will soon catch him at his counterfeiting activities, in order to mitigate his losses.  So, the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs who sit on the board of Governors of the Fed Reserve sell fractional reserve hedge fund derivatives to clients while down the hall they short their clients’ very same hedge funds with Credit Default Swaps, betting that their hedge funds will fail.  That’s worse than prostitutes who only make their money going in; the bankers make their money both going in and pulling it out, shorting their own hedge funds.  This continues until they can’t keep it up any longer and the market crashes and burns.  Not to worry.  It’s called a Recession, then a Depression as everybody points fingers at everybody else and the bankers blame it on a “systemic risk,” or the U.S. Congress who is also participating in this monetary gang bang, or the vagaries of a non-existent free market capitalism, or a mysterious virus from Mars. – FM Duck

“If I could counterfeit the Pink Slip to my ’57 Chevy and sell a million copies to the suckers in my neighborhood for $1,000 each, while replacing the words ’This is to Certify that There Exists One ’57 Chevy on Deposit at FM Duck’s Warehouse Payable to the Bearer of This Note on Demand’ to ’Virtual Non-Existent Car,’ I could make a fortune.  And that’s exactly what the Federal Reserve is doing with fractional reserve banking of the U.S. Dollar and going off the gold standard.” – FM Duck

Netherlands, Europe – In 1994, there resided in the cell next to mine a certain “Tommy”. He had been imprisoned for counterfeiting Dutch Guilders to such a high standard that he had fooled the banks themselves.

   As was customary among prisoners who became friends, Tommy allowed me to read his legal papers and I became fascinated by the judge’s sentencing speech, the gist of which was that his activities had been parasitical. By creating money out of thin air he had reduced the purchasing power of more deserving members of society. What would happen if everyone behaved like him?

   I thought of arguments used, in a different context, regarding inflation. Like counterfeiting, it dilutes the value of the community’s wealth and constitutes a social evil. Creating too much money – “real” or “fake” – can wreck an economy. Such was the Nazis’ reasoning when they planned to ruin Britain’s economy by flooding the country with near-perfect counterfeit bills.

   A lot of nonsense has been written about the world’s current economic woes – about how the crash is the fault solely of the banks and, by implication, governments are blameless; and how it could all have been avoided, and can be put right, by greater financial regulation.

   It is a classic example of what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre terms “the fallacy of managerial expertise”: an attempt by “experts” to blind us with science to justify their overpaid existences and mask their confusion. After all, not one of them was able to predict the current debacle.

   These “experts” will tell you that the present difficulties are simply the result of abuses and excesses in a system that is basically sound. All that is required is for some faults to be corrected. Do not believe them. The reality is that the problem is systemic and a little tinkering here or there will achieve nothing in the long term.

   What is needed is a root-and-branch re‑evaluation of that most curious of cultural inventions, money: how it is created, how it circulates, and how it can best be used to serve the interests of the community.

   To begin, the experts must explain in the simplest terms how money actually works. Were one to ask the man on the street – or, indeed, most politicians and bankers – who creates the money that rules our lives they would reply “the State”. They would be wrong. It is true that governments create legal tender – the physical notes and coins that circulate in an economy – but that represents, at its highest, only 3 per cent of the total money in circulation in the global economy. It is the commercial banks, largely unaccountable and privately owned, that create the world’s money.

   Indeed, even if Tommy were responsible for printing every note in circulation throughout the world his power to dilute the rest of our wealth would amount to only a tiny fraction of that of the real manufacturers of money. His activities and the activities of the bankers are, in essence, identical: the creation of money out of nothing.

   Without knowing it, therefore, Tommy’s judge punished him for usurping not so much the role of the State as the role of the banks. The same mistake – the mis-identification of where money truly originates – has been made by virtually all of our politicians, economists and financial commentators.

   Consider the contradiction at the heart of neo-liberal, monetarist economics that has constituted the Western orthodoxy for the past few decades: to emphasize on the one hand that the money supply should be brought under control while simultaneously allowing banking – where the money is actually manufactured – to run riot.

   To grasp how the global fraud works we need to step back in time and imagine ourselves next to the original goldsmith-banker.

   In his vault, 10 of his customers each deposit a bar of gold...  More...

European Central Bankers Poised to Take Over Europe
Feb 10, 2010

Herman Van Rompuy, the EU's new president, has submitted a text calling for the creation of an "economic government" that shifts responsibility for economic planning from national authorities to the "EU level."

EU Commission chief Jose Barroso said, "Brussels has treaty powers allowing it to take the reins of economic management."

Brussels, Belgium -- Whoa, girl friends, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  You won't believe what the ruling elite of the European Union has in store for all of its member nations.  Would you believe:  a complete takeover of every European nation's sovereignty?  A total usurpation of the constitutions and national authority -- Parliaments and Congresses -- of member nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany and others?  All on the premise of "solving" the current economic crisis.

   Wait a New York minute here, folks.  Who was it that created the current economic crisis in the first place?  Why, it was the European central bankers, just like in America it was the Federal Reserve central bankers.  Who has inflated the crap out of the Euro?  Who has intervened into the European Union countries' economies with tons and tons of state collectivist rules, regulations, and special interest legislation, rendering the member nations as economic serfs to the interests of the EU banking cartel?  The European Central Bank, that's who.

   Yo, Americans, sound familiar?

   And now, just like in America as the Fed Reserve in cahoots with the state collectivists in Congress and both the Bush and Obama administrations, the European Union central bankers pretend the global Depression is some mysterious virus from Mars or somewhere that they, qua central banking elastic currency gurus, must solve by taking over every nation on the planet, starting with the EU nations.

   So, the EU central bankers are meeting in Brussels to "solve" their Big Fat Greek Economic problem.

   Talk about globe trotters, 24 central bankers last Friday...  More...

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows
by
David Reilly
Feb 05, 2010

New York, NY Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc, you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

   Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

   The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received...  More..

ObamaCare is not about health care; it’s about control and profits.  Oddly enough, it’s not the insurance companies; it’s the central bankers…
Dec 21, 2009

ObamaCare is not about health care.  It is all about control and power.  Not by the government, however, but by the central bankers.  The central bankers do not care about controlling the direction or outcome of the War on Health Care; they care about controlling the debt that will be incurred by nationalized health care.  That’s why every government action in a collectivist state must be couched as a War:  a War on Education, a War on Drugs, a War on Housing, a War on Cars, a War on Climate Change, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and Korea and WW I and WW II and all the other wars in every country in the world.  Somebody has to finance it.  And the central bankers of the world pushing inflationary policies of ‘elastic paper currencies’ are standing ready to loan governments – often both sides of a war -- all the cash they want to finance their giant collectivist Welfare States built upon paper promises.  Obama, of course, doesn’t understand this about the Federal Reserve.  He’s just running to stay in place, to stay in power, pushing his socialist agenda because he’s not very intelligent and he actually believes in socialism.  But the central bankers understand that ObamaCare is not about health care.  It is simply one more chunk of indebtedness that the Federal Reserve stands prepared to finance and control with pulp fiction dollars.  Printed out of thin air.  Not backed by gold or anything else except pulp fiction promises.  The Brits did it.  The European Union countries succumbed to it.  Cuba, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Latin American Banana Republics have all sunk into central banking indebtedness.  Now, as ObamaCare threatens to pass both Houses of the U.S. Congress, the people of America will soon become complete slaves to the private U.S. central banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, whose only goal is:  expanding and controlling the debt.  Follow the money.  ObamaCare is not about health care, it’s all about controlling a nation’s future indebtedness with elastic, non-backed, pulp fiction money.  That is the true purpose of a central bank, which makes the concept of “systemic risk” all the more funnier in an ironic sort of way since the system already failed as soon as it succumbed to the central bankers.

Washington, DC –  A small panel of selected Democrats voted on ObamaCare in the dead of night, early this morning at 1 a.m., to pass their nationalized health care plan that will drive America into a huge indebtedness.  Actually, they didn’t vote directly on the 2,100-page health care bill.  They voted on a 383-page “manager’s amendment” in a secret meeting with extreme left Liberals behind closed doors… with no debate.

   The 383-page “amendment” detailed plans by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to rip-off the other 49 states to “guarantee” the last Democratic vote hold-out, Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska), a 100% Medicaid payoff for Nelson’s state, in perpetuity, which means:  forever.  Plus, the Obama administration promised to withdraw its threat to close all the military bases in Nebraska if Senator Nelson promised to vote to support Socialist Obama’s nationalized health care program.  So, of course, crooked Senator Nelson, who apparently has been pretending to be a hold-out on ObamaCare unless the socialist health care plan sufficiently addressed his concerns about abortion rules, melted faster than a hot cube of butter in the Mojave Desert.

   Should we blame the last hold-out?  After all, the Obama Administration has made all kinds of deals with our Parliament of Whores to get his health bill passed.  Louisiana Senate Hooker Mary Landrieu sold her body, mind, and soul for $300 million and was proud to announce it on national TV last week.

   Senator Nelson is not the only guilty party.  He was simply the last to cave-in.  Senator Lieberman “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder where I’m at” was the second to the last to be bought off by America’s Head Pimp Obama.  All 60 Democratic senators are just as guilty as Nelson and Lieberman for selling out the American people – the majority of whom, 60% or higher, depending on which poll, oppose ObamaCare.

   As today’s Wall Street Journal details in a well-written, long Op Ed entitled, “Change Nobody Believes In,” ObamaCare is a morass of unintelligible gobbledegook of bureaucratic baloney that nobody understands, nobody will be able to implement, and the financial consequences of which threaten to bankrupt not only just the health care sector of America, but all related industries, too.  It will not just be 14% of the market economy that constitutes health care that gets financially whacked out of shape.  The entire economy will suffer as employers and individuals scramble through the unintended economic consequences brought about by this labyrinth of contradictory oxymoronic law and non sequiturs.  You must do A, but first you must do B, but if you do B you cannot have A… and so on.  It will take time for America to go bankrupt, but it will happen if ObamaCare passes and the GOP or Tea Party party does not win a majority in the 2010 elections.

   But even as good an Op Ed that the WSJ editorial wrote on this subject, they did miss the main point.  Which is:  Who Stands to Profit from this Bureaucratic Madness called ObamaCare?

   The best way to answer this question is...   More...

How Big is a Trillion Dollars?
Dec 07, 2009

Washington, DC  –  Whoa, girl friends, gather round, shut up, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Have you ever seen a million dollars?  How about a billion dollars?  What does One Trillion dollars look like?

   All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"... A billion dollars here... a hundred billion dollars there... Eight hundred billion dollars for President Bush’s TARP bailout... Eight hundred billion dollars for President Obama’s ARRA “stimulus package”… One TRILLION dollars...

   What does that look like?

   Let’s start with a $100 dollar bill, currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation.

   A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000.  Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for a week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

   Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000).  You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

   While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable.  It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

   And $1 BILLION dollars...

   Next let’s look at ONE TRILLION dollars...  More...

Has Congress become an anachronism?
Sep 23, 2009

Did the Founding Fathers make a huge mistake in creating three branches of government instead of just two?  Think about it.  Since we already have the rules spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights regarding our rights and freedoms, what’s really left for Congress to do except to create tons and tons of conflicting special interest legislation that infringes upon our freedoms?

Where did the Founding Fathers go wrong?  Or did they?

Washington, DC – Let’s discuss the basic structure of the government of the United States and – in light of our 2^nd Great Depression and increasing governmental intrusion into the life of the individual -- ask an important question:  namely, has the U.S. Congress morphed into an anachronism?  Has Congress outgrown its original purpose as one of the three “checks and balances” of government?  Specifically, has the U.S. Congress turned into exactly the type of authoritarian and corrupt entity against which we fought a Revolutionary War for Independence in the 1700s?

   Time for a brief History review.  Listen up, girl friends.

   233 years ago, the Founding Fathers of America broke away from a despotic form of government in Britain called a Monarchy and established their own form of government called a limited Republic.  Our Forefathers did not create a Democracy with 51% majority rule.  They created a limited Republic.  What’s the difference?  A Democracy with 51% Majority Rule is the exact antithesis of the concept of inherent individual rights and freedoms.  Inherent means we obtain our rights and freedoms from Nature, not from the government.  Limited means that our Republic is constrained, meaning, it:  (1) prohibits infringements upon individual rights, and (2) confers upon the U.S. Congress certain limited authority to pass legislation by democratic majority rule, as long as said legislation does not infringe upon (1) above.

   And that is the key:  as long as said legislation does not infringe upon our inherent precursor rights.

   These concepts (1) the source of our inherent rights, i.e. Nature not government, and (2) a limited Republic are important to understand:  Congress cannot infringe upon precursor rights of the people that brought about the creation and the very existence of Congress in the first place, and, in the second place, Congress cannot use the limited duties granted to it by the people to infringe upon the explicit or implied provisions of the U.S. Constitution.  In street talk, Congress can’t dump on those who brought it into existence – unless Congress has become Frankenstein but that’s another movie.

   In short, Congress was not created to be our master; Congress is supposed to be our servant, the protector of the rules, the laws, – not enforcer, that’s the job of the Executive and Judicial branches -- governing our inherent rights obtained at birth.  Today, however, Congress has morphed into what could minimally be described as an expensive snotty little brat throwing temper tantrums on the floor of Capitol Hill.  Somebody, I suggest WE the people, needs to collectively spank Congress’ collectivist little butts.

   I digress, but back to the scene of the crime.

   The explicit protections of individual rights are enumerated in, but not limited to, that portion of the U.S. Constitution we call the Bill of Rights.  Protected rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not to be mistaken as the only rights of the individual.  All other rights not specified belong to the individual, not the government.  In fact, Madison and Jefferson were loathe to even create an explicit Bill of Rights since it was clear in their minds that all mutually non-infringing individual rights and freedoms are automatically obtained at birth and do not need to be specified over and over in a Constitution since all rights spring forth from the same philosophical source:  inherent individual freedom.  As Madison said, this would be redundant.  And he was right.  However, many of the states in the 13 colonies had their own Bill of Rights and forced the inclusion of an explicit bill of individual rights in the new U.S. Constitution – fearing a future federal government would stomp on our major freedoms if they were not explicitly stated.  And it appears they were right, too.  Thus, the 13 colonies wouldn’t ratify the new U.S. Constitution and dump the old Articles of Confederation unless it included an explicit Bill of Rights.  Hesto presto, we got a Bill of Rights.

   In addition to protection of individual, not the collective’s, rights, the U.S. Constitution conferred certain limited authorities and duties to the Congress in Article I.  So we have two important areas, based upon two important fundamental concepts, to think about: inherent rights of the individual and specific duties of Congress.

   Fast forward to today, year 2009.

   We now have a U.S. Congress that appears to be totally corrupt, with out-of-control spending, and illegally ceding power to the Executive Branch of government – thus, subverting intra-governmental “checks and balances,” and, even worse, ceding power to a private corporation that controls and manipulates our U.S. Dollar, a private corporation called the Federal Reserve central bank.  As you will see below, Congress has misinterpreted their Constitutional duty to “regulate the value of our COIN, which must be gold or silver, by law” – as the authority to dump their job onto a private central bank.   Unfortunately, this is the root cause of our current Depression and was also the root cause of our first Depression in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

   As a result,  More...

Obama slaps tariff on cheap foreign moonlight
Sep 15, 2009

Washington, DC -- President Barack Obama yesterday slapped a protectionist tariff against the importation of cheap foreign light from the Moon.

   "I will not stand by and allow the importation of cheap foreign moonlight to bankrupt our national electric light bulb industry," said President Obama, as he invoked Federal Tariff Clause 4321 to save Americans from the dumping of free foreign moonlight from the Moon.

   "In the same manner that French Representative of Parliament, Frederic Bastiat, in 1840, urged the Marie Antoinette government in France to ban the cheap importation of sunlight into France with a Petition of the Candle Makers to protect France from unfair competition by the Sun, I am taking the necessary steps to save American industry from unfair foreign traders, to protect American manufacturers of electric light bulbs, U.S. cigarette lighters, North American Halloween torches, Gringo flashlights, and Yankee Doodle safety matches.

   I mean, think about the unfair cost of imported moonlight:  how much more cheap can you get than zero, and how much more foreign can you get than the Moon?  I know, I know, there will be those pig pirate capitalists out there who will claim that a protectionist tariff against the dumping of free foreign moonlight into our economy will encourage a reciprocal trade war.  But, I ask you, what products will those foreigners up on the Moon ban from importation from the U.S.?  Rocket ships and plastic flags?  Not hardly.  Our last three space shuttles have only flown to the Space Station to fix the anti-gravity toilets and, besides, American flags are now made in China.

   Nor do I have to remind you that moonlight is actually sunlight, light that is bounced off the surface of the Moon and redirected on purpose to ruin the U.S. economy.  I suspect it is the Afghanistanis who are behind this sinister economic plot to wreck America's electric light bulb industry by wearing SPF-52 sun block and sunglasses and landing on the Sun not in the extreme heat of the day, but rather in the cool hours of the night, and thus redirecting free foreign sunlight off the Moon and right into our own backyards under the full cover of darkness at night.

   And so, my fellow Americans, I am also directing my new Tariff Erection Czar, Charlie Cialis, to erect faster than Viagra -- for at least four hours at a whack -- a system of mirrors to reflect this unfair importation of cheap foreign moonlight right back into the faces of those Foreign Light Terrorists whose goal is to totally destroy our socialist economy.

   I implore you, what more could you ask for than 24-hour protection against the importation of cheap foreign light, a tariff against sunlight during the day and moonlight during the night?"

   And, while we're at it, let's invoke a 35% tariff against Chinese tires so they can reciprocate with an import tariff on American chickens and auto parts.

Fed Reserve, America’s legal counterfeiting ring
Aug 5, 2009

 “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth.” – Alan Greenspan, published in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1967, and The Objectivist, July 1966

 Boise, ID – Whoa, girl friends, gather ‘round, shut up, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Before former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan went over to the Dark Side of The Force, namely, Keynesian socialist economics, he was a free market economist who blasted the Welfare State, revealing that the true function of America’s Federal Reserve central bankers is to act as a “legalized” government counterfeiting ring whose “shabby little secret” is to rob the people with clever complicated mechanisms whose series of complex steps involve the member banks issuing and pretending that government bonds, not backed by anything, are treated as if they were an actual deposit of gold, which they are not.

   Read on and have your barf bucket handy.  You’ll need it as you discover that this is exactly what every administration since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913 has been doing, with President Barack Obama’s current administration running its Welfare State on steroids.  Says Alan Greenspan in Ayn Rand’s above-mentioned publications:

   “… But the opposition to the gold standard in any form – from a growing number of welfare-state advocates – was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale… Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.

   The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which – through a complex series of steps – the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold…   More...

GM Bailout Plot Thickens
(Oct 30, 2008)

Washington, DC – Ah ha, the plot thickens in the ongoing saga of GM pretending to buy out Chrysler.

   The CEO of Cerberus LLC is John Snow, former Sec of the U.S. Treasury and alumni of Goldman Sachs investment bank, just like current Sec of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson.  So, John Snow is looking to get taxpayer bailout money for Cerberus's GMAC subprime mortgage slime from alumni buddy Hank Paulson's $700 Billion Bailout Fund or Congress' $25 Billion Electric Car Fund.  Wow, don't the Wall Street bankers know how to feather their own beds and the beds of their Wall Street buddies?

   Read the following news item:  Mon Oct 20  GM to buy Chrysler?  Hmm, let's take a closer looksee at this little boondoggle, shall we?  Here's what's really going on.

   Cerberus LLC owns 80% of Chrysler; Mercedes' Daimler owns the other 20%.  Chrysler has a stash of $11 billion in cash.  Cerberus LLC owns 51% or so of GM, including GM's humongo GMAC car financing and, get this, subprime mortgage debt.

   So, the genius corporate welfare statists at Cerberus LLC have figured out a way to dump GM's GMAC mortgage indebtedness on the American taxpayer:  Cerberus LLC is offering to give Chrysler to GM in exchange for GM giving its GMAC mortgage debt to Cerberus LLC.

   Why would Cerberus LLC exchange Chrysler for GMAC mortgage debt?  Because Cerberus LLC can then get free bailout money from Treasury Sec Hank Paulson's $700 Billion Bailout Booty when Cerberus LLC whines to the government to bail out its GMAC mortgage indebtedness.

   After the Feds bail out Cerberus LLC, then Cerberus will still own 51% or so of GM and -- depending on the deal -- 80% of GM's Chrysler Division AND will have dumped its GMAC toxic mortgages onto the U.S. taxpayers.  Oooh, tricky, tricky.  Cerberus LLC off-loads its toxic GM derivatives -- its GMAC subprime mortgage mess -- onto the American taxpayers while pretending to sell Chrysler to GM.  Wow, what a tricky way to use the government to bail out GM.

   This is not free market capitalism; this is Treasury Sec Paulson's Fascist Business Model at its state interventionist best.  The worst is yet to come.  Welcome to the Pulp Fiction of Keynesian socialist economics and guess what, girl friends, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Cause of financial meltdown is not free market capitalism
(Oct 24, 2008)

Washington, DC –  The current financial meltdown is not an act of, or result of, unregulated free market capitalism.  It is the result of highly regulated central banking -- i.e., going off the gold standard and "legally" monopolizing the issuance of America's medium of economic exchange -- by the government’s national bank, the Federal Reserve.  Same for every nation’s nationalized central bank.

   The Recession is not the result of freedom of choice by the people to establish gold or silver as their medium of economic exchange.  The Recession is the result of a Fascist Business Model of Keynesian socialist economics with non-backed, forced or “fiat” paper currency rammed down the throats of the people.

   Former Fed Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan’s whining before Congress yesterday that he found a “flaw” in free market capitalism that allowed bankers in the mortgage industry to run wild as the cause of the current Recession is just so much bullshit.  Mortgage foreclosures are not The Cause of our current market meltdown but rather just another symptom, an Effect, of The Cause.  The real Cause is hyper-inflation of a non-backed, non-defined, irredeemable U.S. Dollar.

   Greenspan, during his 40 years as Fed Reserve Chief, was never operating in a free market and his continual monetary manipulations, such as lowering interest rates to nearly zero for 3 years, constitute nothing but Keynesian socialist economics.  Greenspan became a Keynesian as soon as he put forth his PhD dissertation on econometrics and thought that he could “manage” the market by the use of differential calculus and historical statistics of past market prices, which is incredibly naive.

   So much for “Maestro” Greenspan’s alleged discovery of a “flaw” in America's non-existent free market capitalism and “confessing” before Henry Waxman’s Congressional Committee of socialist idiots.

   Unfortunately, Greenspan’s pretended allegiance to the free market and “confession” of what he thinks is wrong with free market capitalism will simply serve as more grist for the Keynesian socialists to implement more and more of the same stupid government interventions – mostly more inflation of the money supply – that have brought about our current financial meltdown.

Fed scientists discover new element in Periodic Table of Elements:  Paper
(April 1, 2008)

New York, NY – Whoa, girl friends, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.

   Scientists at Treasury University and Federal Reserve College have just discovered that the entire Periodic Table of Elements has been wrong – or, at least, missing an important element -- for the last 100 years.  In an astonishing new discovery that continues to shock the world of Chemistry and Physics – as well as Economics – Senior Scientist at U.S. Treasury University, Hank Paulson, and his scientific sidekick Ben Bernanke of Federal Reserve College, miraculously stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling discoveries of the 21^st century:  a missing element in the Periodic Table of Chemical and Physical Elements, which they dub:  Paper.

   Last weekend, while working overtime in  More...

Anybody Seen Our Gold?

(Feb 10, 2008)

From GATA's ad in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Jan 31, 2008

Washington, DC – The gold reserves of the United States have not been fully and independently  audited for half a century.  Now there is proof that those gold reserves and those of other Western nations are being used for the surreptitious manipulation of the international currency, commodity, equity, and bond markets.  More...

Smoke ‘n Mirrors Economic “Stimulus” Package:
$600 for you, $730,000 for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac
(Jan 28, 2008)

Lookie, lookie, in my left hand:  $600, free cookies for everybody.  Yippee for you!

In my right hand:  don’t look, don’t look, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bankruptcies bailed out by raising govt-backed home loan limits from $417,000 to $730,000.  Yippee for the bankers!

It is absolutely insane – and insulting to the American public – for President Bush, the leaders of Congress, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Paulson, and Fed Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke, to proclaim that they have magical powers to change Paper into Gold and that by injecting their Fake Gold into the economy, and convincing consumers to exchange this Paper between each other at the speed of light, they can enrich the economy.

Washington, DC – Has everybody gone insane?

   How can grown men and women – President Bush, Treasury Sec Henry Paulson, Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, and Congress -- stand up before the American people on national TV and proclaim that the issuance of 150 billion pieces of green Govt Paper – not backed by anything, not a promissory note, not collateralized by anything but thin air – can somehow magically obtain value by the mere act of printing and distributing it?  More...

The Paper Chase:
Dollar becomes pulp fiction as Fed injects trillions into the market…
But Dollar is not real capital, thus cannot stimulate the economy
(Jan 24, 2008)

The fallacy of the Federal Reserve pretending to “stimulate” the economy by injecting billions of non-backed Dollars into the market is:  Dollars are not “real capital” or “capital goods.”  The truth is that the Fed is merely injecting billions of pieces of little green paper printed up out of thin air.  The only result will be more inflation and unemployment.

What the economy needs is an injection of real capital, not fake money.  But only true entrepreneurs through a free market economy can bring capital to the market.  Central bankers do not possess capital.  They only possess non-backed paper.

What is truly needed is laissez-faire free market capitalism with real entrepreneurs injecting real capital, not a government-sanctioned group of private central bankers (the Federal Reserve) and their special interest groups hyper-inflating the U.S. economy with tons of pulp fiction.

Washington, DC – Listen up girl friends.  Pour yourself another hot cup of Rocket Java, pull up the floor, and have a seat.  Have you ever pondered the following important economic question, let’s say, during foreplay on a hot Friday night with Mr. Right, or whilst leisurely munching on a chocolate truffle in your big bubble bath overflowing with suds from The Body Shoppe?

   Really?  I’m shocked.

   OK, here’s the question:  When the Federal Reserve injects billions of dollars into the economy, what is it injecting:  only “paper” or “real capital?”  More...

Federal Reserve drives U.S. into Super Recession, then Depression, then Martial Law
(Jan 19, 2008)

Not one member of the Federal Reserve -- or 99% of today’s PhD economists or stock market pundits -- can correctly answer the following basic questions in economics:

(1) What is the difference between money and a paper receipt for money?

(2) From where, exactly, does the non-backed U.S. Dollar obtain its value?

 (3) What is the difference between today’s U.S. Dollar and “real capital?”

Therefore, not knowing the answers to these three basic questions, the Federal Reserve erroneously continues to inject trillions of worthless, non-backed Monopoly Money into the banking system, under the false assumptions that (1) green paper printed on a U.S. Treasury printing press magically obtains “value,” (2) the non-backed U.S. dollar is the same as “real capital” and, (3) consumers rapidly spending trillions and trillions of newly injected National Wallpaper can somehow “stimulate” the enrichment of our economy.

The real purpose of a federal “monetary stimulus” package is for the Federal Reserve to bail out their billionaire buddies in banking and pass the monetary inflation on to the taxpayers in the form of higher prices for all commodities and services.

Washington, DC – Turn on the TV, girl friends, and all you hear these days are arguments about how much money the Federal Reserve central bankers should inject into the U.S. economy.  Nobody bothers to ask whether a central bank should inject trillions of dollars into the economy, or whether a central bank should even exist.  Everybody simply assumes that the Federal Reserve should exist, and should pump money into the market; their only questions are:  how much, and by what method?

   But wait.  More...

U.S. Federal Reserve Note:  America’s Pulp Fiction
(Jan 01, 2008)

Once you change the contractual concept of paper money from a redeemable, exchangeable promissory note to an irredeemable exchange-only note, you will have established a precedent for the destruction of all future economic contracts.

America’s “bundled” subprime mortgage slime and every nation’s Sovereign Wealth Funds are direct results of America’s new Pulp Fiction: the Federal Reserve Note.

Washington, DC – What’s the difference between today’s Federal Reserve Note (our U.S. Dollar), “bundled” subprime SIVs (Structured Investment Vehicles), and Sovereign Wealth Funds?

   The answer:  nothing.

   All three rest upon the ridiculous concept that pieces of paper, in and of themselves, obtain value by virtue of the fact that they’re  More...

Goldman Sachs creates subprime slime with left hand, shorts subprime slime with right hand
(Dec 18, 2007)

Conflict of interest?

New York, NY – According to the WSJ, Goldman Sachs mortgage department was a major underwriter of complex bundled securities of subprime mortgages.  When those securities plunged in value this year, Goldman's customers suffered major losses, as did units within Goldman's banking and investment group.

   However, simultaneously down the hall, Goldman was busy "shorting" billions of dollars of these same subprime slime securities, betting that their value would fall.  The big question is:  how could Goldman legally peddle subprime slime to their customers while their own traders were busy betting that bundled subprimes would collapse?  If this isn't a conflict of interest, then what is?  More...

Let's Get Back to the U.S. Constitution
----------
Holy moley, look how fast America is going bankrupt: (click on the puddy tat)

      National News      

The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe

by Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr.
The Wall Street Journal

(Dec 28, 2011)

When is a loan between central banks not a loan? When it is a dollars-for-euros currency swap.

Dallas, TX -- America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.

The Fed is using what is termed a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement" with the European Central Bank (ECB). There are similar arrangements with the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan. Simply put, the Fed trades or "swaps" dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.

Why are the Fed and the ECB doing this? The Fed could, after all, lend directly to U.S. branches of foreign banks. It did a great deal of lending to foreign banks under various special credit facilities in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse in the fall of 2008. Or, the ECB could lend euros to banks and they could purchase dollars in foreign-exchange markets. The world is, after all, awash in dollars.

The two central banks are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.

The ECB is entangled in an even bigger legal and political mess. What the heads of many European governments want is for the ECB to bail them out. The central bank and some European governments say that it cannot constitutionally do that. The ECB would also prefer not to create boatloads of new euros, since it wants to keep its reputation as an inflation-fighter intact. To mitigate its euro lending, it borrows dollars to...  More...

      International News      

Forget Britain's David Cameron Veto, Another Eurozone Crisis is Only Weeks Away

by Jeremy Warner
The Telegraph

(Dec 13, 2011)

Leaders in the European Union will not take the measures towards fiscal union that would save their ailing economies.

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, remains intransigent. ... What he has agreed to do is provide unlimited liquidity to banks, so that they could in theory buy up sovereign bonds instead.  But even if this were to happen, it couldn’t provide a lasting solution. European banks are already bust enough; to exaggerate the problem by loading themselves up with junk sovereign debt is scarcely going to help. As for Germany, hell will freeze over before it accepts joint liability for periphery debts.

There was no fiscal compact of any significance agreed last weekend.  Nor was there any progress made in providing a credible backstop. Even with the extra funds which European leaders are laughably promising via the IMF “back door” (as if they cannot trust themselves with their own money), the financial firewall remains dwarfed by the ever-growing size of the problem. Italy’s funding needs would gobble up the entire bail-out money within two years. In any case, the IMF back-door support is already in trouble. There’s no clarity on where the extra 200 billion euros are going to come from, with the Bundesbank refusing to cough up unless underwritten by the German parliament and confusion over whether non-euro countries are expected to contribute.

If you really want to understand the bankrupt moral philosophy of altruistic collectivism behind what is going on in the European Union today -- as well as in the United States -- I could simply ask you to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or see the movie.  That way, you can also "see" what the obvious result will be.  The question, "Who is John Galt?" will soon be answered in Europe and the US. -- FM Duck

London, England -- You wouldn’t believe it to listen to the fulminating indignation directed at the UK from across the Channel, but David Cameron did the eurozone’s political leaders a favour last weekend. By refusing to sign up, he managed to create a convenient Aunt Sally for Europeans to throw stones at, and divert attention from the summit’s failure to come up with anything remotely credible to address either the single currency’s existential crisis or the gathering economic slump. The latest in a long line of self-styled “make or break” summits, it was in truth no more momentous than any of the others.

What was agreed was some minor strengthening of the Maastricht framework for governing monetary union, though some aspects of the original “stability and growth pact” have actually been watered down. The maximum fine that can be imposed for breach of the rules has been reduced from 0.5 per cent of GDP annually to 0.2 per cent.

In most other respects too, the idea that some kind of great leap forward in terms of fiscal and political union has occurred is a nonsense. Consider...  More...

      National News      

How Does Europe Borrow Dollars from the Fed?

by John Carney
at CNBC

(Dec 11, 2011)

New York, NY -- The Federal Reserve and other banks announced Wednesday that they were engaging in a coordinated action to provide liquidity to Europe's credit markets.

What essentially happened is that the Fed cut the interest rate it charges the European Central Bank to borrow dollars.

The European Central Bank wants the dollars so it can lend them out to European banks, which have been having trouble borrowing dollars at affordable rates due to fears about their financial health.

It’s worth taking a moment to see what actually happens with these swap facilities because they can create the illusion we’re sending boatloads of dollars overseas and the ECB is sending us boatloads full of euros.

Would-be pirates will be disappointed that no currency flotillas cross back and forth on the Atlantic.

What really takes place, for the most part, is down on Maiden Lane in Manhattan’s financial district. That’s where the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is located.

Like most interbank transfers these days, everything is done electronically.

When the ECB wants dollars, it gives notice to the New York Fed. The notice contains how many dollars the ECB wants, when it wants them, what the exchange rate is at the time, when it will pay back the dollars, and what the interest rate will be.

Until today, the interest rate was one percent plus something called the US dollar Overnight Indexed Swap Rate. Today's announcement cut the spread in half, so that the ECB now borrows at just half a percent over the OIS. (It’s very telling that only the ECB has to pay interest. There’s no price for the Fed getting to hold euros.)

Next—and this is important—nothing happens. Not really, that is.

Nothing moves anywhere. No currency flotillas leave for the high seas.

All that happens is that an account at the NY Fed that the ECB has designated as its swap account gets credited with the dollars. This account is really just a line on a spreadsheet in a computer in that Fed building on Maiden Lane. Crediting the account just means that someone enters numbers into a spreadsheet.

At the same time, the ECB enters numbers onto a spreadsheet...  More...

Fix Was In: The Stock Market was Rigged

by John Crudele
at The New York Post

(Dec 08, 2011)

New York, NY -- So, now do you believe me? The stock market was rigged.

It has been a little lonely telling this story over the past few years.

But now that another news organization has finally gotten off its lazy butt, I’ll tell it again: Under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, confidential government information was regularly leaked to select people on Wall Street.

As I’ve explained many times before, The Post got hold of Paulson’s telephone records back in 2009. And the phone logs show that Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, regularly spoke with influential people on Wall Street with whom he shouldn’t have been communicating. These phone calls could have been — let’s use the word “enriching” — for the recipients.

Among his regular phone buds was Lloyd Blankfein, who, for example, spoke six times with Paulson on Sept. 18, 2008. That was a day of great market turmoil and — while there is no way of knowing what the two men spoke about — the calls did coincide with a major turnaround in stock prices.

That was just one example.

There were many recipients of Paulson’s calls. And the conversations went on for years and were especially frequent when...  More...

European Ponzi Goes Full Retard as EFSF Found to Monetize... Itself

by Tyler Durden
at Zero Hedge

(Nov 15, 2011)

Washington, DC -- We have long mocked and ridiculed the Federal Reserve for being the ultimate Ponzi instrument: after all, why worry, when your central bank will buy up almost three trillion in US paper in about 2 years (a very comforting fact for US politicians who never have to fear that those trillions in new porkbills, pardon fiscal stimulus programs, may end up without funding).

Well, as it turns out, those wily veteran bankers from across the Atlantic have just one-upped America yet again.

According to the Telegraph, the abysmal, and barely successful, 3 EUR billion issuance of EFSF bonds (which was originally supposed to be 10 EUR billion, on its very very gradual climb to 1 EUR trillion) had one more very curious feature to it, aside from confirming that it is Dead On Arrival as expected.  It turns out that in addition to being the most convoluted and complex creation ever conceived by JP Morgan which is advising Europe on coming up with structured finance products that are so complex nobody will ask any questions and will automatically assume someone else has done the homework, it is also the quintessential Ponzi instrument.

The Telegraph reports that the already reduced 3 EUR billion "target was only met after the EFSF resorted to buying up several hundred million euros worth of the bonds." You read that right: in its first bond issuance since its transformation to the European Bank/Sovereign Bailout Swiss Army Knife, the EFSF not only failed to raise a minimum token amount, but also had to... buy its own bonds. We can assume that the money the EFSF needed to fund said purchase came from the money growing tree, as at last check the European Central Bank was still not funding the EFSF with crisp, new zEURq.PK equivalent binary 1s and 0s. But at least we all know what happens when the global Ponzi goes full retard.

More on this surreal story which will be promptly buried in the barrage of Monday headlines because an international advisor to Goldman Sachs is now in charge of Italy.

Sources said the EFSF had spent more than 100 Million Euros buying...  More...

Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid

by Andrew G. Biggs & Jason Richwine
Wall Street Journal

(Nov 09, 2011)

Washington, DC -- A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."

Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.

How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.

While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.

Data on employee benefits from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, do not include retiree health coverage, which for teachers is worth about an additional 10% of their salaries. Because of differing accounting rules between the public and private sectors, BLS data also make teachers' defined-benefit pensions appear only slightly more generous than the typical 401(k) plan found in the private sector.

In reality, a teacher who retired after 30 years of service with an annual salary of $40,000 might receive guaranteed annual pension benefits of about $20,330. Under a typical private 401(k) plan, a guaranteed annual benefit might be only around $4,450 (assuming the money is invested in U.S. Treasurys and the employee buys an annuity).

BLS data on paid leave for teachers count vacation days only during the school year, omitting summer and long holiday breaks. A valid pay comparison should include this extra time off, in which teachers can enjoy longer vacations or earn additional income.

Properly counted, a typical public school teacher with a salary of $51,000 would receive another $51,480 in present or future fringe benefits. A worker in private business with the same salary would receive around $22,185 in fringe benefits.

Finally, despite recent layoffs, teachers still have greater job security...  More...

Hell Explained by a Chemistry Student

by Your Humble Servant

(Nov 04, 2011)

Phoenix, AZ -- The following is an actual question given on a University of Arizona chemistry midterm, and an actual answer turned in by a student.

The answer by this student was so 'profound' that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time.  So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely.  I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.  Therefore, no souls are leaving.  As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.  Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.  With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.  Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:   More...

      International News      

Understanding Derivatives and The Bailout

by Your Humble Servant

(Oct 25, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.

To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern because he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These "securities" then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold...  More...

The European Crisis

by Vedran Vuk

(Sep 15, 2011)

Washington, DC -- In many ways, the European crisis is more than just a financial event; it's the death of the argument for a European-style welfare state. This topic hasn't been discussed much in the media, but as the crisis gets worse, this realization should become more apparent to others.

From justifying universal healthcare to unions, to public housing, Europe has been the poster boy in American politics. "If Europeans can do it, so can we" has been the rallying motto. Unfortunately for the Left in particular, this argument is becoming less sensible by the day. With overspending as the root cause of Europe's troubles, only a fool would suggest the same policies here.

In the US, the 2008 crisis has been called the "subprime crisis," and for good reason. The main problem was injecting too much money into the system and causing an unsustainable bubble. Unfortunately, many US and international banks were holding these inflated junk mortgages and toxic assets - hence our current predicament. If anyone was to blame, it was the world's central banks - particularly the Federal Reserve.

However, the current European crisis is much different. The problems of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are very clear. There are no...  More...

      National News      

Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later

by Rep Ron Paul

(Jul 24, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Debate over the debt ceiling has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, with each side trying to outdo the other in a game of political chicken. If you believe some of the things that are being written, the world will come to an end if the U.S. defaults on even the tiniest portion of its debt.

In strict terms, the default being discussed will occur if the U.S. fails to meet its debt obligations, through failure to pay either interest or principal due a bondholder. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling claim that a default on Aug. 2 is unprecedented and will result in calamity (never mind that this is simply an arbitrary date, easily changed, marking a congressional recess). My expectations of such a scenario are more sanguine.

The U.S. government defaulted at least three times on its obligations during the 20th century.

-- In 1934, the government banned ownership of gold and eliminated the right to exchange gold certificates for gold coins. It then immediately revalued gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35, thus devaluing the dollar holdings of all Americans by 40 percent.

-- From 1934 to 1968, the federal government continued to issue and redeem silver certificates, notes that circulated as legal tender that could be redeemed for silver coins or silver bars. In 1968, Congress unilaterally reneged on this obligation, too.

-- From 1934 to 1971, foreign governments were permitted by the U.S. government to exchange their dollars for gold through the gold window. In 1971, President Richard Nixon severed this final link between the dollar and gold by closing the gold window, thus in effect defaulting once again on a debt obligation of the U.S. government.

Unlimited Spending

No longer constrained by any sort of commodity backing, the federal government was now free to engage in almost unlimited fiscal profligacy, the only check on its spending being the market’s appetite for Treasury debt. Despite the defaults in 1934, 1968 and 1971, world markets have been only too willing to purchase Treasury debt and thereby fund the government’s deficit spending. If these major defaults didn’t result in decreased investor appetite for U.S. obligations, I see no reason why defaulting on a small amount of debt this August would cause any major changes.

The national debt now stands at just over $14 trillion, while net total liabilities are estimated at over $200 trillion. The government is insolvent, as there is no way that this massive sum of liabilities can ever be paid off. Successive Congresses and administrations have shown absolutely no restraint when it comes to the budget process, and the idea that either of the two parties is serious about getting our fiscal house in order is laughable.

Boom and Bust

The Austrian School’s theory of the business cycle describes how loose central bank monetary policy causes booms and busts: It drives down interest rates below the market rate, lowering the cost of borrowing; encourages malinvestment; and causes economic miscalculation as resources are diverted from the highest value use as reflected in true consumer preferences. Loose monetary policy caused the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, and now is causing the government debt bubble.

For far too long, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and quantitative easing have kept interest rates artificially low, enabling the government to drastically increase its spending by funding its profligacy through new debt whose service costs were lower than they otherwise would have been.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats sought to end this gravy train, with one party prioritizing war spending and the other prioritizing welfare spending, and with both supporting both types of spending. But now, with the end of the second round of quantitative easing, the federal funds rate at the zero bound, and the debt limit maxed out, Congress finds itself in a real quandary.

Hard Decisions

It isn’t too late to return to fiscal sanity. We could start by canceling out the debt held by the Federal Reserve, which would clear $1.6 trillion under the debt ceiling. Or we could cut trillions of dollars in spending by bringing our troops home from overseas, making gradual reforms to Social Security and Medicare, and bringing the federal government back within the limits envisioned by the Constitution. Yet no one is willing to step up to the plate and make the hard decisions that are necessary. Everyone wants to kick the can down the road and believe...  More...

Fed Reserve Theme song: "Money for nothin, and your checks for free"

(click title to play, minimize media player to see lyrics below)

(FM Duck plays hot riffs in "Money for Nothing")

Sung to Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing”

I… want… my… ATM…

Now look at them bankers,
That’s the way you do it,
You print the money from the Fed Reserve.

That aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Money for nothin and your checks for free.

Now that aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb,
Maybe get a billion from a subprime mortgage,
Maybe get a billion from an SIV.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

See the little banker with the earring and the makeup,
Yeah buddy, that’s your 700 Billion,
That little chrome-dome, got his own jet airplane,
That little chrome-dome, he’s a billionaire.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

I shoulda learned to be a big banker,
I shoulda learned to loan that cash,
Look at that banker, he got it stickin out his pockets,
Man, we could rule the world.

And Paulson’s up there, what’s that?  Another Bailout?
Banging on the Congress like a chim-pan-zee,
No, that ain’t workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Get your money for nothing, get your checks for free.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

Now that aint workin
that’s the way you do it,
You print the money from the Fed Reserve.

That aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Money for nothin and your checks for free,
Money for nothing… and…

And your checks for free.

Get your money for nothing…
And checks for free,
Look at that, look at that…
Money for nothing…
And your checks for free,
Ahh, money for nothing…
And your checks for free.

new lyrics ©2008-2011 FM Duck

--------------------

 Investing in Gold?

New!!  Feb 12, 2010: Ponzi Scheme - by Puru Saxena

Feb 26, 2009: Timmy, Larry and Benny are Lost in the Fiscal Wilderness - by Roger Wiegand

Dec 5, 2008: Red Alert: Gold Backwardation!!! - by Antal Fekete

Sep 24, 2008: The gold standard strikes back - by Antal Fekete