Charles Joins Judge Andrew Napolitano This Weekend!
Don't Miss "Freedom Watch" on Fox Business Network
Labor Day Weekend - Private and Public Sector Unions
Saturday 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EDT and
Sunday 7:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. EDT.
"The Freedom Watch Starts Now!"
________________
"American consumers are trying their best to deleverage."
"In terms of the story, the patient is actually trying to lose weight. But the government is blocking deleveraging and trying to boost consumption. They are forcing food down the patient's throat. According to the Flow of Funds Report, households reduced debt at a 2.4% annualized rate ($330 billion) during Q1 of 2010. Meanwhile, the federal government was piling on debt at an 18.5% annual rate ($1.44 trillion). Since every dollar of government debt is a promise to tax the private sector in the future with interest, this public spending spree effectively negated the Herculean efforts of the private sector to return to a sustainable path. That's where the arrogance of Washington is really apparent.
Scores of millions of American consumers have made the decision that reducing their debt burden is in their best interests right now. But a few hundred individuals in government believe they know better than the collective wisdom of the entire free market. By leveraging up the public sector, they have used their power to confiscate our savings. In short, they are forbidding us from following the common sense path to fiscal health."
- Michael Pento, via ZeroHedge.com HERE
________________________________________
Tim Kelly puts it more graphically...
THE OLD HAIR OF THE DOG CURE!
________________________
They First Make Mad: Summertime Tales of National Bankruptcy
by Charles Goyette
Perhaps it's because the daylight lingers, but the season seems especially revealing of the madness of those who have the nation staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. Among the summer's disclosures is news that the monetary authorities have topped their refusal to be audited with an indifference to the truth of their testimony before congress. July has also provided a reemergence of the harebrained Treasury officials in charge of hustling the people's billions in the meltdown two years ago.
Both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then New York Fed President Tim Geithner assured senators in April 2008 banking committee testimony that the assets assumed by the Fed in its bail-out of Bear Stearns were "investment grade." In loading its own balance sheet with unprecedented credit risk, the Fed not only made the American people guarantors of toxic paper – and placed the value of the US dollar at greater risk – it materially misrepresented the quality of the securities involved. While credit quality and credit risk were at the heart of the unfolding banking crisis, the Fed itself was claiming that $30 billion in collateral it assumed consisted of only currently performing and investment grades assets. But the collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed bonds involved had already been downgraded at the time of the testimony.
In the face of Fed stonewalling, Bloomberg News had to go to federal court to get documents in the transaction released to the light of day. Finally this summer Bloomberg was able to report that the government "became the owner of $16 billion of credit-default swaps, and taxpayers wound up guaranteeing high-yield, high-risk junk bonds."
Senate Banking Committee member Richard Shelby told Bloomberg that despite his efforts to discover the quality of the assets during the 2008 testimony, "It is apparent that the Fed withheld from the Congress and the public material information about the condition of these securities."
July also brought sightings within days of one another of former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and his former Goldman Sachs colleague and Treasury sidekick Neel Kashkari. Each was found in the pages of the Washington Post shining light on matters of our economic health going forward. Paulson wrote about housing policy and the roots of the crisis, but one searches in vain for a word about the Federal Reserve's role in the debacle. Kashkari, who ran the $700 billion dollar TARP program conceived by Paulson, offered his thoughts about "the collective good."
The appearance of the pair should help dispel any pretenses about governmental competence, all the illusions of special expertise and the engineering conceit that the economy can somehow be managed by the brightest technocrats with Harvard (Paulson) and Wharton (Kashkari) MBAs and Goldman Sachs on their résumés.
One need only think of Paulson himself lurching from one iteration of the "Paulson plan" to the next. One day he favored buying distressed assets from the banks, arguing that injecting capital into the banks hadn't worked for Japan. The next he was presenting leading banks a "take it or take it" offer to sell the government preferred shares.
Any remaining illusions vanish with a glimpse at the precision with which they arrived at the amount of the $700 billion boondoggle.
It would be a mistake to think the calculations involved analysts, risk managers, statisticians, and banking regulators burning the midnight oil at the Treasury. "Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air," the aptly named Kashkari said. Actually he did it all on his Blackberry. When Paulson told him he couldn't get a trillion dollars, Kashkari put his investment banking skills to work in earnest. "We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number."
A nice round number, indeed, although one suspects that Kashkari and Paulson are not quite so cavalier when someone offers to back the truck up to their own bank accounts.
But it is not just Fed and Treasury officials who are responsible for our national insolvency. Before July melted into August, the elected wing of the governing classes added to our dependency on Chinese creditors. Republican congressmen came together to support President Obama's surge in Afghanistan with a $59 billion emergency spending bill. Within days of the vote we learned that July was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in America's longest war. The news came just as Congress left on its summer recess.
No wonder they had to get away. It's already been a long, hot summer and it's not over yet. Who knows what disclosures will come to light as we swelter through August and race to the destruction promised those the gods have made mad.
________________________________
Two from the pen of Tim Kelly:
THE COUNTRY THAT WOULD NOT BE OCCUPIED!
____________________________
JAWS 2010
_________________________________
Why You Must Not Rely on BubbleVision
or Other Corporate Media Outlets for Economic Insight!
In The Dollar Meltdown, you may have noticed my recommendation of John Williams' valuable website, ShadowStats.com, for its eye-opening description of how the government cooks it's economic reports.
The lapdog financial press is complicit is this widespread deception.
In this account Williams describes a joint appearance with an extablishment economist as well and the not-so-secret and all too typical agenda of corporate news operations:
"We got on the air, I gave my recession pitch, and he proclaimed a booming economy for the year ahead. He was a good economist and knew what was happening, but he had to put out the story mandated by his employer, or he would not have had a job. More recently, following an interview on a major cable news network (not CNBC), I was advised off-air by the producer that they were operating under a corporate mandate to give the economic news a positive spin, irrespective of how bad it was. " And that is how the free media operates in this now doomed country, programmed from above to lie to its viewers."
I have numerous media experiences of my own that corroborate John William's anecdotes.
-- Charles
____________________
COINED LIBERTY!
Or Token Statism!
How to Gauge the State of Liberty by Reaching into Your Pocket!
by Scott Rentschler, Awakening to Liberty
In the last chapter of The Dollar Meltdown, Charles Goyette makes a fascinating observation about what has been depicted on American coins over the years:
America's earliest coins portrayed Liberty. Not rulers and politicians. Just Liberty. A symbolic representation of the country's highest ideal. In the beginning Americans had an affair of the heart with Liberty. She was their muse and they were aflame in their love for her. They talked about her everywhere, in their churches and taverns and town squares. But she hasn't appeared on our circulation coinage for more than sixty years, not since the beautiful "Walking Liberty" half-dollar. It represented Liberty striding gracefully into the rising sun of the future, arm extended in peace and carrying a bounty of riches. It was a beautiful representation, well chosen, because abundance accompanies Liberty wherever she goes. Our devotion to her would be no less if it were not true, but it is one of her secrets: Liberty creates prosperity.
Today's coinage, looking each year more like subway tokens, celebrates the state. Just as words replace deeds and paper substitutes for gold, politicians have displaced ideals. The American state, which was created to serve Liberty, is now commemorated instead.
If you are like me, you have probably never seen most of the portrayals of Liberty on early American coins. Therefore, I thought it would be instructive for us to look at a few examples of American coinage through the years, contrasting the early portrayals of Liberty and prosperity with the more recent portrayals of politicians and state monuments.
Illustrations and more at LewRockwell.com HERE
____________________
This Week U.S. Federal Debt (the visible debt) Hits $13 Trillion!
__________________
"When the dollar melts, how not to join it..."
A Lew Rockwell Podcast. Lew talks with Charles Goyette:
"Libertarian hero Charles Goyette pegs Obama and company as clueless about economics. The only thing they know how to do is to print and spend more fiat money, and redistribute other people's property. DC politicians across the board are displaying arrogance and ignorance, and sometimes malevolence, as they create a global currency crisis. Energy and food prices have gone up 19% in the past twelve months, the agencies that rate Wall Street bonds are government monopolies, and Treasury securities are junk bonds. What to do?
Goyette warns that some unfortunate history will be repeated. We might even face wage and price controls, capital controls, rationing, and bank holidays. And it can happen very fast. Consider holding physical silver and gold, along with cash, outside the banks. Charles judges the severity of the coming meltdown by the recklessness of the governing classes, and they are behaving now with wild abandon. One antidote: Charles Goyette's libertarian and Austrian THE DOLLAR MELTDOWN.
Listen Here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2010/05/16/151-how-not-to-be-melted/
_____________
The Canary Died!
It Must Be a Defective Bird!
quote of the day!
Mish: "Gee, fancy that. The world needs more dollars to defend the Euro."
Read more HERE
_______
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream!
YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO PRIVACY... PROTECT IT!
Times Online:
Back in January last year, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going – he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was this: “I’m going to leave my life behind and disappear,” he said.
A 38-year-old Oxford graduate with a solid if unspectacular career in media, Bond wasn’t your typical runaway. But then, you might have said the same about Will Smith in Enemy of the State, or Robert Donat in The 39 Steps – two of Bond’s favourite films. For Katie, left alone with a toddler, his disappearance could not have come at a worse time. “I had to juggle the childcare and work,” she says, “and I was seven and a half months pregnant.”
Bond might never have thought of running away if he’d not received a letter, some months earlier, informing him that his daughter was among 25 million Britons whose records had been lost by the Child Benefit Office, along with bank details and other private information.
He “became obsessed”, Katie remembers, about the amount of information on him and his family that was already out there. As he looked into it, he found that the UK, once a bastion of freedom and civil liberties, is now one of the most advanced surveillance societies in the world, ranked third after Russia and China. The average UK adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day by nearly five million CCTV cameras. Increasingly monitored, citizens are being turned into suspects. Within 100 yards of Bond’s home, he discovered, there were no fewer than 200 cameras.
Read it...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The job before Congress is to bring the fear of God back to Wall Street!
"Not to stifle enterprise but quite the opposite: to restore real capitalism. By all means, let the bankers savor the sweets of their success. But let them, and their stockholders, pay dearly for their failures. Fair's fair."
More from James Grant: The trouble with Wall Street isn't that too many bankers get rich in the booms. The trouble, rather, is that too few get poor -- really, suitably poor -- in the busts. To the titans of finance go the upside. To we, the people, nowadays, goes the downside. How much better it would be if the bankers took the losses just as they do the profits.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE HANGOVER HEARINGS
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
GODS AND MONSTERS
What these people do they do in our name. We are responsible.Are you a citizen or a subject?
Think about it. -flynn
Having watched the video of the death of the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in that July 2007 video, his father said: "At last the truth has been revealed, and I'm satisfied God revealed the truth... If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?"
Read this article.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PLANNING FOR DISASTER
A New Review of THE DOLLAR MELTDOWN
by Patrick Krey, The New American
Radio host and author Charles Goyette has no doubt about the future of the U.S. dollar. The question isn’t whether the U.S. currency will become virtually worthless but when it will happen. Goyette wrote The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil and Other Unconventional Investments for the express purpose of giving people an opportunity to protect themselves and their families in the face of what he contends is an inevitable collapse of the U.S. dollar, owing to the federal government’s outrageous inflationary spending.
There are numerous other books out there offering financial advice, proclaiming to help the reader get rich quick. Unlike those, this book instead attempts to help the readers preserve whatever they can of their existing savings in the face of the ongoing destruction of the U.S. fiat currency by the “wizards in Washington.”
... Through anecdotal examples and witty analysis, Dollar Meltdown is a much more readable book than others on a similar subject. It is informative but also keeps the reader engrossed enough to keep turning the pages. There are many amusing quotes and a few of his most memorable ones will stick with you after you’re done.
That is not to say the book is light-hearted. If anything, it’s a massive downer, as it takes a sober look at what lies ahead. America is on a collision course with bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve Notes we currently exchange as money are IOUs that our national leaders have overextended beyond the point of no return. “America’s national government has moved way beyond a political spoils system…. It has become a piñata: everybody gets a crack at it…. But the piñata does not survive the party. It is bashed to bits.”
Read the entire review HERE
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Lonely... I'm Mister Lonely!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CAP AND TAX, ANOTHER PRODUCTIVE IDEA
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
QUESTIONABLE COMPANY?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Archived Page Link
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
