In this video, Eliot Spitzer, former Governor of New York and a Democrat, describes the Fed as a “Ponzi” scheme. I think this guy should become a libertarian. We already know that he is not opposed to prostitution in and of itself, and might therefore realize that its prohibition is an unworkable policy. And by the time he’s finished barking up the Goldman corruption tree, he might just shake down a few apples of Austrian economics. I don’t dare hope for what next year might bring - don’t want to jinx it.
I attended another of Barney Frank’s public forums, this one sponsored by the Brookline chapter of the League of Women Voters. The entire session can be viewed on Brookline Access Television. I asked Barney to comment on the possible return of “stag-flation” - the combination of high unemployment and high inflation, a phenomenon that, when it appeared for the first time in the 1970’s, threw a monkey wrench into the macroeconomic dogma of the Keynesians. For the central bankers had always insisted that inflation and unemployment were connected to each other in a rough inverse relationship - and therefore that monetary policy was a sort of game to balance the two by constantly tinkering with the interest rate. By inflating the money supply, the Keynesians hope now to “stimulate” growth in the economy. Their theory ignores the fact that certain stages of the production chain are more sensitive to the interest rate than others, and that an artificially (i.e. not market-driven) low interest rate will thus not “stimulate” all stages equally. The total amount of investment will surely be increased, but it will also become unbalanced in favor of capital goods over consumer goods. This distortion will eventually make itself felt during the bust phase of the business cycle, and unemployment will result - since people will have to leave jobs that were part of a Fed-induced “bubble” activity, and move to other jobs generated by genuine consumer demands.
The People’s Bank of China holds about $2,000,000,000,000 in U.S. currency as “reserves.” How did they get all this money? Well, they did it by selling products to lots of Americans, who paid for those products in dollars. Why didn’t they use the dollars we gave them to buy American products, you ask? Well, America isn’t the industrial powerhouse it once was. We don’t make products that people in other countries want to buy. But wait, you may ask, if Americans don’t produce anything, where do we get the money to afford our oversized houses, gas-guzzling SUVs, and oh-so-indispensable electronic gadgetry? Simple - we borrow money from the Chinese. After all, they’re the ones who have it. And they don’t just stuff it mattresses - they’ve been more than happy to lend some of their profits back to our government, by buying Treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve has recycled this money back in our economy, keeping interest rates artificially low, and the American standard of living artificially high.
Why do the Chinese lend money to America? For the same reason that any lender does - they expect eventually to be paid back, in full, plus interest. However, it is becoming apparent that the United States might just not decide to ever begin paying back its debts. Whenever a bond comes due, the U.S. just floats another bond to get the money to pay off the first, and so on. The Chinese then, instead of accumulating more and more of our wealth, have more and more of our debt, every year. The U.S. national debt stands at about $11,000,000,000,000 - and since it is clear that our new president has no intention of offering up even one balanced budget over the course of his first term, the national debt will continue to grow. It might seem obvious, but in order for the U.S. to make good on its debts, we will actually have to start spending less and saving more. Or we can just keeping borrowing until no one is left who is willing to lend to us, and then we can default, leaving our creditors holding the bag - which will either be empty, or filled with trillions of worthless Federal Reserve Notes (that have lost all their purchasing power due to hyperinflation). Either way, our creditors lose big.
Last week, the Chinese Premier, to whom our Secretary of State paid a special visit in order to beg him to continue giving the U.S. government the money it needs to pay its bills, said that he is “concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.” He also asked the U.S. to “maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.” Guarantee? In what way? Does he think that the U.S. is going to pledge some real asset as collateral - Hawaii, perhaps?
I skyped last weekend with a friend of mine who lives in Shanghai. We discussed the trade imbalance between the U.S. and China, and I asked him the question that Peter Schiff asks almost every day: why would the Chinese continue to loan us the money to buy their products, when it is clear that we are fleecing them, and equally obvious that they could get us to pay up simply by threatening to short sell the dollar and destroy out economy. Don’t they have us by the balls? He told me that the communist regime is concerned about one thing above all else - preserving stability. He told me that 20 million Chinese factory workers have lost their jobs in this depression and have gone back to the countryside, that there are hundreds of small protests every day throughout their immense land, and that the government knows that if demand for their exports were to fall even more, the resultant job losses could bring about a domestic insurrection. Couldn’t the Chinese just consume their own products, I asked? My friend reminded me that just as Americans of my generation have learned to spend beyond their means and fund their life through endless debt, the Chinese people have a culture of saving and thrift. Their government can’t force them to become hyper-consumers, not overnight. Just as it will take Americans a while to learn how to save, it will take the Chinese some time to learn how to consume. Their government is actually subsidizing large consumer purchases, in an attempt to get people spending - but the efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. And so they need us, for the time being.
On Monday, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, aka the Ben Bernanke of the East, posted a speech in which he called for a new international monetary system, one in which the reserve currency would be “disconnected from individual nations” and “able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.” When I read the first paragraph, I thought: “Wow - have the Chinese finally woken up and decided to buy gold, and return to REAL money?” This move would certainly put them in a position to dominate the world markets for a long time to come. But, as it turns out, Mr. Zhou (who once declared “If the market can solve the problem, let the market do it. I am just a referee. I am neither a sportsman nor a coach.”) is not advocating for the abolition of central banks and a return to a free-market commodity money. No - he wants more of the same. He’s not arguing for market competition, but rather for the opposite: a monopoly “super-sovereign reserve currency,” controlled by a world central bank, which he thinks will most likely evolve out of the International Monetary Fund’s SDR.
Since the Chinese will certainly have an influential seat at the table of any upcoming international monetary reform negotiations, perhaps Zhou is hoping that this new bank, this “trustworthy international institution” which will “both create and control the global liquidity,” will soon be in the market for a new global governor. With a good Keynesian like Zhou at the helm, we could all look forward to a glorious future.
A bill has been introduced in the House and in the Senate that would allow the People of the United States, through their elected representatives, the privilege of auditing the Federal Reserve System. I say “a bill,” instead of “two versions of a bill” because the text of H.R 1207 and the text of S. 604 are exactly the same. So, assuming they could just work out the difference in titles (and I don’t think either of the authors will care if we go with “sunshine” or “transparency”), if this bill passes both house of Congress, it will become law without delay.
What can we do to help the two authors (Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul) to gain support for their bill? We have to make sure that each house of Congress holds a vote on this bill - and when that vote comes around, we must make sure that every single congressperson who has not previously indicated their support (by becoming a cosponsor of the bill) understands one simple fact:
There is a large and well-organized group of voters that would like them to vote “yea.” There is no comparable constituency that would like them to vote “nay.” Using simple arithmetic, they should be able to figure out that a “yea” vote will gain them political support, and that a “nay” vote will cause them more trouble than opposition to such a self-evidently decent bill will entail for them, politically. We don’t have to make a moral argument with them (even though the moral argument is overwhelming) - we just have to appeal to their sense of benevolent self-interest.
So let’s start contacting our elected representative. Each of us has three phone calls to make, or three emails, faxes, or letters to write (one congressperson and two senators). These options are not mutually exclusive, and the cost of doing all of these things is slight, compared to your share of the 1,200,000,000,000 dollars that the Fed plans to bring into existence by fiat over the next several months (roughly $4000 per person). Even if you factor in an hour’s worth of labor costs (at a remuneration comparable to Ben Bernanke’s $191,300 salary), you’ll be making a sound investment.
3 2-minute calls @ $0.10/m = $0.60.
3 emails = FREE
3 faxes @ $1 each = $3.00
3 letter @ $0.42 = $1.26
1 hour of labor = $91.97
GRAND TOTAL = $96.83
The Fed can’t REALLY create money out of nothing. When they inflate the money supply, all they do is take some of the purchasing power out of the money that already exists (some of which is YOURS), and re-distribute that purchasing power to themselves, in the form of the new notes. Inflation is a tax. And if we allow the Fed to tax us to the tune of $4000/person, they should allow us to know what they’re using OUR MONEY for. It’s that simple. If you’re like me, and you don’t have an extra $4000 laying around that you can spare, and if you’d like to prevent another tax like this from being enacted in the future, perhaps an hour of your time and a few postage stamps will be a sacrifice you’re willing to make.
This afternoon, I had an extremely interesting conversation with Tom Woods, author of the New York Times best-seller: Meltdown - A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Tom is very busy promoting his book, so I was really happy to be able to spend a half hour with him, discussing the financial crisis. In order to record my talk with Tom, I used a website called Talkshoe, on which I plan to continue hosting a “show,” featuring interviews with people whose political or economic views I think deserve more attention. You can use the widget below to listen to our conversation. You can also download the mp3 file by clicking here.
If you think it sounds like Tom knows what he’s talking about, I encourage everyone to read his book. You can order it from Amazon by clicking on the image below.
After the usual introductory platitudes, the first point of substance that Obama makes in his speech is: “[I]t is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”
So true! By understanding the past, we might be able more intelligently to determine the best actions to take in the present. So how exactly did we arrive at this moment? According to Obama, the culprits behind the financial collapse are apparently:
1. Our failure to find “new sources of energy” (as opposed to imported oil).
2. The rising costs of health care, and the delaying of “reform.”
3. Schools that “do not prepare” our children to compete in a “global economy.”
What a coincidence! Energy policy, heath care reform, and education just happen to be the three areas in which Obama wants to increase the amount of direct control the federal government exerts over our lives, and ones that have been pushed by Democratic special interests for years now! Isn’t justice poetic? And though Obama’s grammar it not terribly exact, he seems to imply that failing to solve these “challenges” was what led us into “spend[ing] more money, and pil[ing] up more debt.” Furthermore, by some complex logic that he apparently feels no need to elucidate, these three bogeymen (energy, health care and education) are somehow related (inversely?) to tax cuts (which he refers to as “transfer[s] [of] wealth to the wealthy”), deregulation, and what has come to be known as “predatory lending.” Funny, I can’t remember any regressive taxes being enacted under the Bush administration (unless, that is, he means the rampant inflation which began under Bush and will continue under his successor). With every passing year, the congress regulates more and more of our daily affairs. I won’t even get into the ultimate causes of lax lending standards (I’m happy to leave that task to best-selling author Tom Woods).
It’s hard for me to write a coherent response to Obama, since his speech is such a jumbled pastiche of cliches and unrelated Democratic Party talking points. But as he continues, saying that the way to “jumpstart” our economy is to get the banks lending again, and to “invest” in this magic trio of issues that his propaganda apparatus will soon transform into the latest blueprint for supporter indoctrination, I just have to ask: When exactly did the government become this benevolent force for positivism with regard to the economy? When did it become the government’s job to “invest” in our future? When did presidents begin having an “economic agenda” - a collectivist regimen into which we puny individuals are now forced to fit ourselves, as best we can?
To me, these sorts of Obamunist phrases would sound more appropriate in a description of life under a socialist system of economic organization. The U.S. government now claims the right to “invest” our money (which it will of course have to take from productive individuals, leaving them with less money to invest according to their own determinations of relative profitability, a determination which the government can entirely disregard - for why bother about profit margins when shortfalls can be recouped through taxation, infinite borrowing, and money-creation?). The U.S. government asserts the moral duty to determine how wealth is “distributed” (turning the concept of taxation from one concerning what portion of our earnings we - by our passive consent - allow the technocrats to take, but rather what portion of our earnings they - in their infallible wisdom - allow us to keep). The U.S. government, by gradually taking greater control over the banking system and over what’s left of the nation’s industrial (read = productive) sectors, endorses the view that central planners should administer our livelihood and plan our prosperity (reducing the formerly free individual to a charge under the care of a paternalistic regime, from cradle to grave).
In doing all this, our leaders fall prey to a sort of short-sighted arrogance: they believe that they can solve all of our immediate problems from a boardroom in Washington, and forget that there will be future problems that will only become more acute in a society that is no longer full of the innovative, independent efforts of entrepreneurs, but whose efforts will instead be clumsily directed toward one or two short-term policy goals. As Hayek is prescient enough to note in The Constitution of Liberty, even if the planners are the most intelligent and well-intentioned beings that society currently has to offer us, “to make the best available knowledge at any given moment the compulsory standard for all future endeavor may well be the most certain way to prevent new knowledge from emerging.” As Mises makes clear in “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” once the government attempts to plan a single piece of what was formerly a self-ordering system of free enterprise, the resultant side effects must lead to yet another intervention, and so on, until the entire system is under the direct control of a central authority.
The most dangerous trend in America today is not the brazen and shameless wholesale adoption of policies which, just a generation ago, would have been seen as treasonous and un-American. More worrisome still is the accompanying loss, on the part of the average American, of the belief that individual action can mean anything - the bewildered acceptance of this new reality, in which the citizen’s job is merely to choose which faction of the ruling class will take his money, control his livelihood, and issue him orders. We keep hearing the word “plan” repeated over and over, and we have largely come to accept, if not the associated policies, then at least the underlying philosophical principle. We no longer try to provide ourselves with what we want, but have come to rely on the government to give us what it decides we need.
In his comprehensive analysis of the political economy of the major communist regimes, Janos Kornai says that “one important ingredient in the official [socialist] ideology consists of the basic promises made by the party to the population when it comes to power.” Kornai notes that classical socialism often emerged in a country that had been poor and backward before the revolution. Although it would be a bit far-fetched to compare the present-day USA to the largely pre-industrial countries like Czarist Russia or Republican China, the massive national debt of the USA could certainly qualify us as poor. Our industrial infrastructure is certainly backward, after years of the market-distorting inflationary actions of the Federal Reserve System. Kornai’s hypothetical pre-communist state is intent on “concentrating resources on stimulating growth and making sacrifices on behalf” of this goal. Sound familiar? The people are bombarded with “reassurance” and told that “mobilization for work” will ensure a “promising future.”
What is the primary promise? According to Kornai, the “first and perhaps most important factor to provide is jobs. There is to be full employment, if not at once, then in the foreseeable future. Everyone able to work has a constitutional right to work.” Or, in the phraseology of the plan Obama sets forth in this speech, “It’s an agenda that begins with jobs.”
Obama claims not to be hampered by any sort of “ideology.” Perhaps that is how he can say with a straight face that he doesn’t “believe in bigger government” after ramming through the most imbalanced budget in history and raising the national debt to an unprecedented $11 trillion. And since he apparently holds no political principles whatsoever, if we are to construct even a basic idea of what sort of institutional framework free individuals will have to work within over the next 8 years (if case you didn’t notice, presidents no longer serve 4-year terms), we must examine his promises instead.
Aside from his assurance that he will act “boldly and wisely,” are there any specific commitments made by Obama in this speech? Well, of course he promises to “save or create 3.5 million jobs.” As I have noted several times previously, this vacuous phrase is an intellectually dishonest evasion, reminiscent of Soviet doublespeak that assured shoeless, starving peasants that production quotas for shoes and foodstuffs were being constantly over-fulfilled. More than “90%” of these jobs are planned for the private sector - so you can be sure, at least, that he’ll create around 350,000 new government jobs that do not produce anything of value, and must be paid for by new taxes on the productive sectors of society. And we’ll engage in the sorts of public works projects that failed to end the Great Depression, and which have mired present-day Japan in a recession lasting over a decade.
Next, Obama ticks off the hand-outs to various constituencies that he is attempting to bribe with goodies. This is a typical tactic of the political class, and one that allows them to perpetuate their power with little effort: take our money away, and give it back to interested parties that together form a majority of voters, thus ensuring their support in future elections. He resumes the platitudes by telling us that all this new spending with be subject to strict oversight. Yeah, we’ve heard that one before.
On to the nitty gritties of the financial crisis. According to Obama, “the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy.” And for that reason, the government is “creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.” What Obama doesn’t seem to realize is that credit is really another word for savings - capital that is not being used by its owner and can thus be lent. To the central bankers tasked with implementing Obama’s policies, however, credit will simply mean fiat money created out of thin air. This “credit” will either re-inflate an old bubble (which is what Obama apparently wants, judging by his plan to “help” homeowners) or lead to the creation of a new one. The government cannot create savings, and by funding all these new government programs, and keeping interest rates artificially low, it will simply prevent individuals from saving as well. The Austrian theory of the business cycle tells us what will happen next (hint = bust).
The way Obama paints it (even though his plan for instituting a command economy is “not about helping banks” but about helping “people”), the American Dream is based upon the profligate consumer spending that fiat bank credit enables. Without bank credit, apparently, that “young family” will never be able to buy a home. The “builder” of that home will never be able to afford a car. He implies that a family unable to afford a home, or a worker unable to afford a car, are both moral problems that government somehow must solve.
It used to be that Americans had a culture that prized self-reliance and thrift. There was a time, not too long ago, when the conventional wisdom said that if one cannot afford something, one should not buy it - and certainly not that one is entitled to it. A president who propagates the idea that even those who cannot afford a particular luxury of life still somehow deserve to posses it, or that the government must ensure that they have it, is paving the road to an ideological climate in which each person believes he should have the things he “needs.” Is it really possible that an American president is calling for an economic system in which a central government judges for us who “needs” what, who “deserves” to have what and - worst of all - who should pay for these subsidized luxuries?
Obama is fond of making competitive comparisons between the U.S. and other countries: We can’t let other countries “out-teach” us. We should feel ashamed that hybrid cars have batteries made in Korea. He will not let American car companies fail. Besides stoking nationalist sentiments (always a popular pastime of demagogic leaders in terrible economic times), the implicit and unquestioned assumption underlying these sorts of statements is that countries, and not individuals, are the entities that “compete” with each other for success in markets, industry and production. This of course leads directly to the conclusion that national production should be centrally planned.
A faint outline of Obama’s ideology is beginning to emerge. In addition to his views on the redistribution of wealth, and the moral duty of government to determine which classes of citizens deserve special treatment, he is willing to do “whatever proves necessary” to achieve his grand vision. He is focused on results, and restrictions on the means to his goals must be damned. He is unwilling to let principles (or the Rule of Law) get in the way of actions. Easy for him to say, since he won’t suffer the consequence of his actions, and since, as the most powerful man in the world, he no longer needs the principles that used to protect the liberty of regular Americans like you and me. He sees his budget not as “simply numbers on a page or laundry lists of programs” but as “a vision for America – as a blueprint for our future.” He has a plan to reshape America, in a way that only he can, that only government can. He is a man of “big ideas.” He believes that government not only has the solutions, but IS the solution. Like many a socialist before him, he is almost completely oblivious to the mundane economic realities that will make his ideas impossible to realize. Let us hope that his pride is not as big as his ambitions.
Here are a couple of videos, in which Max Keiser predicts the hedge fund scandal we are witnessing. If you think “naked short selling” (making up fake stock certificates so that one can sell them, driving the price of the stock down, and then buying them back along with real ones at the lower price) sounds weird, just remember that our government does something similar with our money, printing up billions of essentially counterfeit dollars to “inject” into banks. Of course, this sum pales in comparison to the TRILLIONS of virtual dollars the Fed has created through its recent loans to undisclosed recipients. These loans are guarenteed, of course, by the U.S. taxpayer. Would you like to know what sorts of risks the Fed is taking with YOUR MONEY? Sorry! They’re trade secrets.
Note that Max does not say that free markets don’t work…only that the markets we have are not free, and haven’t been for a long time. Does government intervention (”regulation”) work? Or could it be that government intervention is the source of all these shennanigans?
An interesting video that includes interviews with several Boston protesters and with G. Edward Griffin, the author of “The Creature from Jekyll Island.”
My name is Sean Ryan, and I am running for congress in Ohio’s 11th district. I am running for public office because I fear for the future of our country, and because I intend – in one way or another – to put a stop to the dishonorable and un-American acts we’ve allowed our government to perpetrate in recent years. I recognize the dismal quality of our leadership in Washington, and know that it is now my responsibility – as a citizen of the world’s first free nation, and a land that until recently was a beacon of hope for humanity; it is now my duty, as a free individual, to stand up to the misguided men who are leading us down a road to servitude, a path of ignorance - on a rough ride that will end in ruin.
It’s time for truth.
We have been at war now for over five and a half years. We’ve spent billions of dollars on the tools and techniques of meaningless destruction. As our cities have disintegrated, as our small towns have wasted away, our government has squandered our money overseas, policing the world and seeking to spread its influence in lands where we simply aren’t welcome. We the people have allowed them to lead us – to make decisions in our names – and they have killed thousands upon thousands of innocent human lives, ruined our reputation in the world, alienated our friends and allies, sowed the seeds of future conflict – and sacrificed 4169 of our precious brothers and sisters, on the altar of a war that is illegal, immoral, impractical, counterproductive and seemingly without end - and all of it, based on a lie.
It’s time for truth.
Over the past seven years, we have stood by and watched as our supposedly inalienable rights and freedoms were trampled on, nullified, and stolen. While we sedated ourselves with televised distractions, corporate consumer crapola, and pre-packaged plastic patriotism – a gang of thugs in Washington has shown an unparalleled and extraordinary contempt for the rule of law. They’ve shredded our Constitution, ignored the will of the people, and covered up their dirty tricks under a pretense of “executive privilege.” Abuse of power is not a partisan issue, it is a fact of life: and the government now has the legal power to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, arrest you without a warrant, render you to an undisclosed location, deny you access to a lawyer, and interrogate you using methods they like to refer to as “enhanced.” They can forcefully enter the homes of peaceful protesters and confiscate our private property. And as they methodically destroy the very core of our free society, they tell us that they’re destroying it in order to save it. We’ve heard that line before – and it’s a lie.
It’s time for truth.
Today, after years of insane and profligate profiteering by financiers and speculators on Wall Street; after years of easy credit and loose money; after years of a shadowy and opaque alliance between government and a powerful banking cartel; after downsizing, outsourcing, and job losses; after increasing disparities of wealth, steadily rising prices, and a decline in the standard of living middle-class and working-class people; we are now faced with an imminent financial crisis. The moneyed interests have meticulously hollowed out the American Dream, sold it off to the highest corporate bidders, and left our hopes and aspirations on the verge of collapse. Now that their house of cards is falling, they want us, the taxpayers, to foot the bill! After we bail them out, what will we have left to give our children, other than a crushing burden of debt? How will our kids pay for dreams of their own?
In times of crisis, leaders like to talk. They tell us that the system was “mismanaged.” They tell us that these economic booms and busts are a normal part of what they call the “business cycle,” but that this time, things just got out of control. They tell us that all we need is more government, and to confer unfettered power on one man – a banker turned regulator, who sat there in our penniless treasury, watching this debacle take shape. They tell us to pass an “Enabling Act” for the 21st century, to abandon the last threadbare vestiges of American self-reliance, willingly to embrace socialism for the rich, and to trust a government that has failed us countless times, in innumerable ways. The banks say that they are “too big to fail,” they are holding the American people hostage, and the government is telling us that we must submit to their demands. Many Americans see right through these flimsy fabrications, but others are justifiably scared and want the false security of easy answers.
The truth is that there is no easy answer. We are caught between two undesirable prospects: either a period of serious economic hardship, if we correct our mistakes and allow free market forces to reduce this false bubble of prosperity to a more realistic level; or, if we the people allow this bailout to be foisted upon us, then we’ll sink farther into the quicksand of mounting debt, and bring about an accelerated devaluation of the dollar, and the eventual destruction of our currency. Faced with these two options, I prefer the one in which every citizen retains some semblance of economic freedom. The Democrats can add oversight clauses, punishment measures for financial executives, citizen dividends, and more – but the basic reality will remain unchanged: this bailout bill is a sham! It’s a naked power grab, it’s an affront to our constitutional separation of powers, and it may very well be just one more step toward the complete subjugation of the American people. Even worse, it will not accomplish what it sets out to do. We may kick the can down the road for a few months, but the truth is that our system of fiat money, printed at will by politicians and multiplied many times over by fractional reserve bankers, cannot last. The world is waking up to the monetary scam we’ve administered, and their faith in the dollar is dwindling. The longer we avoid the truth, the more painful its eventual prevalence will be.
It is the entire system that must go, this system in which we allow self-proclaimed experts to control our money, to manipulate the value of these pieces of paper, and to control us using the one product that we all need, and over which they have a complete monopoly. The system must go, and with it will go the crooked leaders, who prevent us from using other, more stable forms of currency and who steal our savings by spending money they don’t have, saddling us with a hidden inflation tax. It is the Fed that is the chief enabler of inflation and the cause of periodic recessions. Let us openly call this system what is – an organized crime syndicate, perpetrated from behind the fortified walls of legalized thievery dens, like the one behind me. Let us penetrate their secrecy! Let’s tell Americans how this money system works, and see what they think. The monetary status quo is built on foundations of ignorance. They can hide behind their veil of deceit, but not for much longer. They can lie to us, but they know the end is near. The power resides ultimately with the people. If the banks refuse to operate in an honest fashion, then we, as a united force, possess the ultimate option: one that would entail certain collapse for any of these inherently insolvent institutions. We can simply boycott any bank, withdrawing our deposits, and it will immediately fail. I will soon begin a personal boycott of my own, not for political reasons, but simply to protect what little savings I have.
The clock is ticking, people: The sun is setting on the American Empire, and at the stroke of midnight the party will be over. We’ll all go home, we’ll say what a great time democracy and freedom was, we’ll shut our eyes, and we’ll wake up the next morning with a terrible hangover in a nation governed by fear, force, and famine. Maybe we’ll regret some of the things we did, but by then it will be too late. When we finally shake off the haze of our long intellectual slumber, we may already have witnessed the dawn of fascism in America.
The clock is ticking, people: An age is ending, and I’m here today to tell you what time it is.
It’s time for us to end the wars, to bring ALL of our troops home, to dismantle the empire, to commit to a philosophy of non-violence, and to become a nation of peace! It’s time we roused ourselves from this corporate-induced hypnosis, stood up for our imperfect but fair and beautiful Constitution, steadfastly opposed invasions of our privacy, restricted the powers of the government, and took personal responsibility for our own lives! It’s time we paid down the budget deficit, learned once again how to live within our means, abolished the Federal Reserve System, and went from a debt-standard back to a gold-standard! And above all else, it is time for every American to take a long and hard look - in the mirror. Yes, it’s time for change, but true change comes from the unleashed creative energy of free individuals! Yes, it’s time for change, but true change can come only from within! It’s time for us all to admit what we as a people have become, apologize for the wrongs that we’ve wrought, humble ourselves before the ultimate and unchanging reality of the universe, discard the remnants of a failed collectivist creed, and go back to the principles upon which our nation was founded: faith in the rule of law, respect for individual rights, accountable and small government, and power to the people!
There’s nothing a mighty tyrant fears more than an educated poor man, since a man who has little to lose will not hesitate to fight for what is just! Nothing is more confusing to the arrogant, to the corrupt, than the simple wisdom of the young and idealistic! For eight years, an emperor has stood before us, and now his soiled secrets are there for all to see – the emperor has no clothes! Will we let him steal the shirts off our backs? Our country is bankrupt! We can’t pay our debts! Wake up, America – we’ve got little to lose, and we’re already poor! All we need now is to get educated!
Fear will come upon us – freedom is a void, a vast emptiness of future possibility. But throughout this painful time, the promise of peace will be our sustenance. We may lose some of the pleasures we’ve been taught to take for granted. We may experience some of the trials of our forefathers. But in our darkest hour, the light of liberty will shine brighter than ever before, and it will guide us across the ocean of the unknown. Who can say what new world we will discover? Let us step into the light! We’re ready for much more than “change.”
