GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN PURE RACISM

                                   
                             GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN PURE RACISM

The shut down of the U.S. government by the bigots on the far right has absolutely nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. That act was voted on and became the law of the land which was further vetted and upheld by the Supreme Court. Whether they like it or not, they know full well there is nothing they can do about it.

No, the reason for holding the government hostage is all about plain old racism. These Fascists have made it clear that their entire agenda is to bring down Obama. Right wing Conservatives have dealt with numerous Democratic presidents throughout the years, and they somehow always managed to compromise and therefore get things done. But their hatred for Obama is based purely on the color of this President's skin.

Shutting down the government is one thing. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling and plunging the U.S. into default for the first time in history is quite another. The consequences would be catastrophic. So let's see if their blatant racism is great enough for them to ruin the credit of the United States along with the U.S. dollar.

Someone is going to have to blink. In the past it has always been Obama. This time it is the right wing extremists' turn. With the stakes beyond the comatose American people's comprehension, the bigots will blink or the Republican party will be toast.

October 4, 2013

NO BOMBA OBAMA

NO BOMBA OBAMA

There appears to have been no education gained from our experiences in Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the United States takes it upon itself to interfere militarily in places where it does not belong, unintended consequences are the inevitable result leading to the loss of life and treasure.

Our allies and our Congress do not seem to be very interested in backing the President's vow to strike Syria for having crossed his ill-advised red line when it comes to chemical weapons. In fact, it is not clear that all of these weapons of mass destruction came from the brutal Assad. The unsavory mix of rebels are certainly not the kind of people you would invite to dinner.

President Obama has gone out of his way to place himself between a rock and a hard place. Let us hope that he does not place ego and personal credibility above common sense. For those of us where education has taken place, we should make it known to the struggling commander-in-chief: NO BOMBA, OBAMA.

September 6, 2013



FINANCIAL CRISIS LOOMS AHEAD

The next financial crisis is a "when," not an "if." The previous meltdown in 2008 was caused by the too-big-to-fail banks. Those same banks are now bigger, and their ridiculously leveraged, opaque, over-the-counter derivative bets are also bigger. Nothing has been done to fix a single thing. In other words, everything that was wrong in 2008 is worse today. 50 million people are on food stamps, 24 million unemployed, 11 million on disability, 76% of Americans have no savings at all, 46% have less than $800 in savings And we are witnessing the conversion of America into a part-time working society.

At the start of the last crisis the Federal Reserve's balance sheet was $800 billion. Today it is $3.3 trillion and increasing at $1 trillion a year. What you have, therefore, is a banking system that is bigger and riskier than it was in 2008 and no funds to bail them out when the inevitable takes place because the Federal Reserved is tapped out.

 As long-term bonds, the largest bubble in financial history, is bursting before our eyes, interest rates will continue to rise which will make it more and more difficult for the U.S. Treasury to finance its existing debt with new debt. This Ponzi scheme will go on as long as people and rigged markets remain addicted to the heroin of paper money created out of thin air.

To maintain the confidence and delay the inescapable crisis that looms ahead, the government issues phony numbers on GDP, unemployment, inflation etc. But as the old saying goes: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

We are now seeing the beginning of the dreaded loss in confidence. Foreigners just sold a record number of U.S. Treasury bonds in a desperate effort to get out of harm's way. New housing starts just plunged 13% in a single month. This further traps the Fed, since  there is no way for them to taper their $85 billion purchase of bonds per month. Should they do so, the markets and the economy would collapse, and the Fed would have to return with even greater stimulus. Always remember, as another familiar adage makes clear: "The emperor has no clothes."

August 24, 2013

THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS TRAPPED

THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS TRAPPED

The Federal Reserve is now trapped. As you may know, this cartel of private bankers is buying up most of the U.S. Treasury debt. When they even just hinted that they might taper off their $85 billion per month buying of our U.S. Treasury bonds, the financial markets freaked out. Big Ben (Bernanke) was then forced to contradict himself and state that the economy was not really doing that well, and that the Federal Reserve may have to continue buying bonds and printing money perhaps to infinity. The markets did a 180 and headed for the moon..

Fundamentals no longer matter to market participants. Genuine price discovery is a thing of the past. The stock market is addicted to quantitative easing (the printing of more and more dollars) by its enabler, the Federal Reserve. Bad news for the economy becomes good news for the market because it means that the Fed will have to continue creating dollars which, of course, gives the addict (the stock market) what it must have. The benefit to the real economy is negligible. While the market may go up for a few more months, you know that it's going to end in tears as it always does when the fundamentals are dispensed with.

Yes, Ben is in a box. If he tapers off his bond purchases, the bond market will crash, taking the stock market with it. If he continues or even has to intensify his creation of paper dollars, then he risks a savage inflation which destroys the U.S. dollar and leads to the world losing confidence in our currency. It's all about the dollar after all. If Bernanke lets the dollar fall in order to pay back the remarkable Federal debt with cheaper greenbacks, then he risks the crucial advantages that the petrodollar and the reserve currency of the world give to the USA. What's a chairman to do? Probably retire and hand over the insoluble problem to someone else.

July 13, 2013



WE ARE SINKING INTO A POLICE STATE

WE ARE SINKING INTO A POLICE STATE

Those who are willing to give up some liberty for safety don't deserve either one.  Benjamin Franklin.

With this past week's revelations that the Executive Branch has an arrangement with the country's three largest phone companies to obtain the phone records of almost all Americans, only to have it further disclosed that the same Executive Branch has transformed the Bush - Cheney  warrantless intrusions  into the Prism program which allows the intelligence services to mine all of the country's major Internet providers by direct access to the companies'  servers in order to be able to obtain: email, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more, then is it possible that Americans can remain in denial that our country is plunging into a police state? Is it not curious that Homeland Security will be purchasing 1.6 billion blunt-nosed bullets and 2,750 light-armored tanks? It is undeniable that one definition of Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power.

When I voted for Candidate Obama is 2008, it was because he promised change from the embarrassments and encroachments of the Bush years. Even before Inauguration Day it was obvious to me that the upcoming President Obama would be just another puppet in a long string of puppet presidents who took their marching orders from the Federal Reserve and their cohorts on Wall Street.

Besides surrounding himself with a Wall Street Cabinet and advisors, his statements that he would not look back, only forward, was a tip off that he and his do-nothing attorney general would not go after the Bush-Cheney war crimes nor would they bring a single case against the banksters whose greed and outright fraud came as close as you can to bringing down the global financial system

Instead of change we got intensification. Obama signed a bill into law which allowed the U.S. military to arrest Americans and hold them without trial. Internments camps have been built that can currently hold 80,000 Americans without having to charge them with any crime.

And then there is the militarization of police forces throughout the country where on a recent occasion 100 square miles of Boston was placed under martial law while armored tanks roamed the streets......all in an effort to find a 19-year-old kid.

Wake up, America. Write articles, call your so-called representatives in Washington, utilize your social networks to organize a groundswell of opposition to what is happening in this country. Rediscover the words: civil disobedience.

June 16, 2013

GETTING OUT OF THE BANKING SYSTEM

GETTING OUT OF THE BANKING SYSTEM

The governments of the Western developed countries and that of Japan have become desperate. They are printing paper currency at the speed of light.  A financial catastrophe is being concealed from the public. My guess is it has to do with the one quadrillion plus dollars in over-the-counter derivatives. In any case, the central banks and the central planners are now out of control.

The public remains in its long term coma thanks to the propaganda machine of the mainstream press who assures everyone that everything is just fine. But it isn’t fine. The theft of depositors’ money in Cyprus is not a one-off phenomenon. Canada, New Zealand and other countries have passed laws that would enable them to do the same. Should a major bank fail, you could wake up one morning only to discover that the government has stolen money right out of your account and given it to the bank in order to save the institution. People vs. banks and governments is no contest. It is an adversarial relationship that inevitably will go from bad to worse.

But, you say, our bank accounts and our stock accounts are insured. Really?  The FDIC may have almost 1% of the total depositor funds with which to reimburse depositors. And unless you own your equity portfolio in your name with specific stock certificates, don’t even think that your stocks are safe. Most everyone’s portfolio of stocks is in street name. That means when the brokerage company goes bankrupt, your stocks go with them. The moral of this tale is: you don’t own what you can’t touch.

But none of that could happen here, you say? The Federal Reserve came on the scene in 1913. Had you placed your money in a checking account 100 years ago, each dollar would now be worth $0.04 cents. Now that’s what I call theft on a scale almost unimaginable. It’s done to Americans surreptitiously like the frog analogy. Place a frog in boiling water (Cyprus) and he’ll jump right out. But put him in warm water and gradually turn up the heat. He won’t notice it until it is too late.

With the endgame getting closer by the day, those few renegade individuals who actually think for themselves are getting out of the banking system while they can. As confidence is gradually lost in the authoritarians and their paper money Ponzi scheme, people with functioning brain cells will exit the system in astounding numbers. They will buy whatever you can’t print. What’s your plan?

April 9, 2011

GET USED TO FRACKING

                                                       GET USED TO FRACKING

About a month ago DR. Alan Chartok had a show about fracking on WAMC. For an hour people from all over the area called in to express their displeasure, their horror, on how this brutal method of extracting oil and gas from shale will destroy the ground water and in general poison the environment. I for one could not have agreed more with each of the callers. The toxic chemicals along with the unimaginable quantities of water necessary to carry out the horizontal drilling in order to get the fossil fuels trapped underneath the land will surely cause horrendous damage.

Since I was in the car driving up to Williamstown, I heard the entire show. And I could not believe that not one person seemed to understand the inevitability of widespread fracking. After all, the possibility of the United States becoming energy independent after years and years of sucking up to OPEC is so overwhelming, so game changing, that the issue is basically a done deal.President Obama is holding fifteen licenses to drill in the Bakken Shield of North Dakota, the Eagle Ford of Texas and the Monterey formation in California etc. All of the big bad oil companies are champing at the bit to get those licenses. But Obama is holding them close to his vest. They are, after all, worth a fortune each. And since the country is broke, Obama will indeed sell them, but not before he extracts his pound of flesh from the companies.

My guess is that the economic possibilities involved are so great in terms of not only energy independence, but the creation of thousands and thousands of jobs along with great wealth, that Obama will become a hero very much like FDR. And like Roosevelt, the American people may even want Obama to run for a third term. If he can't overthrow the 22nd amendment, there's always Michelle.

I know all that sounds crazy. And I will mourn with so many of you over the destruction that will surely be done to our land and water. But the economic potential is so great, it could literally lead to the re-emergence of this country. Lets face it, the economy and jobs versus the environment has never been a contest in America. Much to my chagrin, the writing is on the wall.

March 4, 2013