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The Realist
How To Barter Your Way Out of the Depression April 27, 2009 – Brett Buchanan Four years ago most Americans believed only good economic times were ahead. We were all swimming in equity. Financial markets constantly tested new highs. Being unemployed was mostly a choice. Aside from the unfortunate circumstance of war we found ourselves in - all systems were good-to-go. Today, most Americans see only uncertain economic times ahead. No one is swimming in equity. Financial markets constantly test new lows. Unemployment lurks around every corner. And unfortunately we still find ourselves in a state of war. What lies ahead on the economic horizon is anyone’s guess. Looking back, the path to this catastrophe began in the Clinton administration, cruised through Bush, and has now landed on Obama’s lap, who has surrounded himself with the Clinton alumni that helped set the course into our present quagmire. Our leaders in government, at the Fed, and in the private sector failed miserably in their responsibility to see this crisis coming. They were asleep at the wheel. Catatonic as the car careened off the cliff even now they would deny the crash ever happened if they could manipulate the data well enough. So if our leaders failed to see the proverbial curve in the road, what makes you think they have any clue about what lies ahead? There exists such a vast disconnect between the power base in America and the rest of us that I don’t think too many people would disagree there are in fact two Americas - a small concentrated one that rules, and a vast subservient one that obeys. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the
1
America I signed up for in grade school. That a small ruling class now controls our government through the strong arm of centrally planned monetary policy and finance capitalism should be apparent to anyone with a TV or Internet access. And that this ruling class now lacks the common decency to provide the public a clear picture of what our future most likely holds is not only shameful, it’s criminal. Pundits argue that it would be irresponsible for government to warn people about the possibility of economic collapse. They would argue that it is the government’s responsibility to remain steadfast, to act as a calming force, to remain level-headed in the face of adversity so that people might not panic and demand their money from the banks or hoard food. If that’s the case, then what good is government? If they can’t warn us of a known impending catastrophe, one that they created no less, then what the hell do we need them for? To impose martial law when panic hits the streets? So what does the future hold? Anyone with some common sense can deduce that unemployment is going to get downright scary. Shadowstats.com already has real unemployment at 20% and rising. That’s one out of every five adults without a job. Imagine one out of four, or one out of three. You know what happens to shopping malls then, they close down and their parking lots turn into flea markets and barter towns. Jobs are the backbone of social stability in the US. Take the jobs away - stability goes with them. These are the things our government should be preparing us for. And if you think I’m insane, think again. Because I guarantee you that tucked away in some corner of CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, in a room where five brainiacs used to conduct mock missile exchanges with the Soviet Union, those same guys are now theorizing about what would happen in American cities if unemployment hits twenty-five or thirty percent by the end of 2010. Let me tell you, they’re not thinking we’re all going to come together and hold hands in a circle around the campfire as we belt out passionate renditions of God Bless America.
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They’re thinking about how to round up our guns. As unemployment climbs throughout 2009 two things will occur. One, those people still employed will spend less. Two, the newly unemployed will burn through their savings. When the savings of the newly unemployed dries up, when there are no more 401k funds to tap, when the Pee-PiP plan and all these other hair-brained schemes have transferred another trillion or ten in equity loss from the banks to the public, when your neighbor’s house is fire-selling to a carpet-bagger for half what you owe on your mortgage, when people just flat out refuse to pay interest on overpriced assets anymore, that’s when you see collapse. ARM resets are coming. The jobs situation is becoming obvious. By the end of 2009 the American economy will have deteriorated to the extent that there is no more hiding it. Our government will be talking deal on our external debt. Holders of US dollar reserves will be pissed. Think China. Dollar collapses, US debt defaults, bingo, game over. USA bankrupt. Look at the American experiment as one big bubble. Rome was a bubble. The British Empire was a bubble. Nazi Germany, bubble. Soviet Union, bubble. USA, bubble. Here is our situation. Public debt is out of control with federal expenses going parabolic while tax revenues are plummeting. The combination of which renders the Obama administration deficit projections for fiscal year 2010 and beyond laughably incorrect. Furthermore, the bailout costs are much worse than anyone is willing to admit. Even if we did skate by without an all-out collapse when you tally up the real numbers on; mortgage write-downs, consumer credit write-downs, derivatives losses, direct bailouts and stimulus, municipal bailouts, (you know those are coming), and other bailouts and stimulus that we haven’t even imagined yet but will most definitely rear their ugly head, we’re flirting with five, seven, maybe as much as ten trillion dollars that will be added to the US Treasury’s debit column. When George W. took office the national debt was $5.7 trillion dollars. When he left office it exceeded $10
3
trillion. Are you ready for $20 trillion dollars of national debt? You better be, because it’s coming. You can bet your paycheck on it – Obama just did, literally, he bet your paycheck on it. My question is this. What are the Federal Reserve and US Treasury going to do when the waiter brings the final bill to the table? Pass it to us? Sorry Ben, my credit card’s tapped. A PhD economist friend of mine, Paul Boyce, aka Doc, sent me an essay written by Dmitry Orlov titled Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century. It’s the kind of reading that sticks with you for a day or two - and not in a good way. The essay exposes similarities and differences between the pre-collapse Soviet Union and present-day America. A few things jumped off the page at me. One, those vodka-chugging Russkies sure got a lot of oil. They’re energy rich. Two, nobody got displaced from their homes when big red collapsed - they were all living in government housing to begin with. Three, the USSR’s centrally-planned cities had good public transportation that everyone simply continued using even as their world crumbled around them. And four, Russians were pretty much used to life sucking anyway. I mean let’s be honest, they never had as much stuff or as much freedom as us Ugly-Americans. The point is this. When our system collapses we don’t have any oil. We will be displaced from our homes. Our mass public transit may as well be two pregnant donkeys and a busted cart. Face it, we’re not used to life sucking. So when a collapse hits you’re going to see a lot of stunned folks walking the streets mumbling about how the Federal Reserve was supposed to maintain stable prices and economic growth. No one will understand that the Debt-Taxation-Inflation model the Fed used to perpetuate their siphon-from-the-bottom scheme was in fact the cause of all our ills. 2009 is shaping up to be the year of reckoning. 2010 could be the year of civil unrest. Here is where we should take our lesson from the Russians. Go buy cases of bar soap and staple toiletries. Razors, condoms, tampons, the kinds of things American soldiers used to bring over from the states during
4
World War II to lure French chicks into bed. Pile canned goods in the closet under your stairs. Buy it all in bulk and get ready to be the guy on your block everyone comes to in trade. And remember, women will do anything for 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. I’m talking about chores you pervert. The question of our time is this. Will the injection of trillions of dollars through stimulus and bailouts into the US and global economies stave off disaster? As I said before, our leaders didn’t see the crisis coming, they miscalculated it when it hit, and their only answer has been to throw newly printed money into the credit funnel. Anyone could do that. To believe that our leaders have a realistic handle on the ultimate outcome of these acts of desperation is to believe Rush Limbaugh is a closet liberal. If you take away one thing from this read take away this – it was the creditbased monetary system that got us into this mess. Why pour more money into the top of that funnel? We don’t need more bank credit. We need more real money at the bottom Mr. Obama. Now that would have been an act of Change. All those trillions of dollars you’ve committed and will continue to commit to the planet’s biggest losers, the banks and corporations that have taken so much from our world, you could have just written checks directly to the American people. But I suppose when your Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel worked for the primary dealer Dresdner Kleinwort and your Chief Economic Advisor is Larry Summers, no background needed there – he’s the devil, then the idea of helping the little guy first really isn’t an option, is it? The jury’s still out on you Mr. Obama, and they’re getting restless. Within the last few weeks a surge in political activism has overwhelmed the nation. For now the mainstream media, with the exception of Fox News, has painted the efforts of disgruntled Americans as mostly coming from the right. I disagree. I attended a Tea Party and I can tell you firsthand the majority of people there were simply fed up with a power structure that
5
continually holds the public down while we get gang-raped by the moneyed elite. The fight this nation faces is not a fight between the right and left. It is a war of the people against the fusion of money and government – you know, those two bedfellows inextricably glued together by the Federal Reserve. My battle is to get people on both sides of the political fence to lay down their conservative and liberal monikers and just be Americans, at least until we reign-in the Fed. On that note, the esteemed Peter Schiff gave a keynote address at an Abolish the Fed rally in New York City, April 25th. Schiff had this to say, “The Federal Reserve was behind all of it and we’re not going to get to the root of our economic problems unless we get to the root cause, which is the Federal Reserve and the phony monetary system we now have.” Personally, I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am not a Libertarian. I am not left or right of any persuasion. I am a God damned human being. And most importantly I am a freethinking realist. And I don’t have any control over what the thin layer of authority in this nation is doing to our future. Did I say thin layer? I meant Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner. They’re running our country in case you weren’t aware. It’s time we woke up and started acting like responsible citizens. It’s time we realize we are one people. We The People – doesn’t anyone get chills when they hear those words anymore? I do. I recently read the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. You know what I learned? Thomas Jefferson is the most brilliant son-of-a-bitch that ever lived. His words are the reason that so many millions of people over the last two hundred plus years have done anything in their power to escape the clutches of tyranny in lands far away and made arduous journeys just to set foot on our soil. I am so proud of my country when I think of what our forefathers penned on those pages of hemp and gave to the world at risk of their own lives.
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After I’d read our Constitution and Bill of Rights there is one truth I know. No one will ever separate me from my fellow Americans - not Rush Limbaugh, not Sean Penn, not Ted Turner, and not Ann Coulter. I agree with no one who puts their politics before the beliefs of other people. We all come from such a diverse landscape of experience that shapes who we are and what we feel. These are the things we should value in one another. These are the things we should embrace. Our diversity is our strength. But the manufactured political frequencies emanating from our flat screens and newsstands only divide us. Show me one major media outlet that aims to unite us and I’ll show you a direct lineage to our founding framework. The Federal Reserve counts on two things for its survival. One, our ignorance with respect to money creation and the Fed’s Debt-TaxationInflation model that erodes our wealth and inflates the moneyed class’s balance sheets every minute of every day and two, our ignorance again with respect to the moneyed class’s manipulation of the media, of which they control, into dividing an entire nation right down the middle with both sides hating the other, blinded by hollow rhetoric that when you strip away the façade reveals people that aren’t so different after all. But we’re too afraid of each other to admit it. The Plutocrats count on our ignorance for their survival. They believe we’re too stupid to understand the complexities of modern banking - so best keep the Fed meetings secret. And we’ve never had an original thought in our lives so why not feed us a bunch of blue and red hype through the left and right media and then sit back while the masses bicker amongst themselves over trivial social issues. Meanwhile, they rob an entire planet blind. And when the bubbles pop they whack us over the head again with the government bailout stick. If we really want to do something about our future, if we really want to take back the liberty we know has been usurped from us by the moneyed elite
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and their bidders in congress and the White House, then you have to take down their power base – the Federal Reserve. Without the Fed, sound money can be restored. Boom-bust can become a notation in history books. And we can all sit back, drink wine, cast a line in a stream, go hunting, save a tree, or do anything else it is us crazy Americans do in our spare time. Below is a link to sign the Petition to Abolish the Federal Reserve – among other links. Congressman Ron Paul is at the root of this effort. I endorse Ron Paul only to the extent of his efforts to bring down the Fed. Go to the site. Read. Sign. Subscribe to my feed. Email me and tell me I’m a loon. Worship me. Loathe me. I don’t care. Just take some action. http://www.petitiononline.com/fed/petition.html - Petition to Abolish the Fed http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co.../cr091002b.htm - Ron Paul speech 2002 http://ronpaul.com - Unofficial Ron Paul site http://endthefedusa.ning.com/ - End The Fed USA http://thenewamerican.com - The New American Contact the author at; brettbuchanan@yahoo.com Web-Site; http://itsnotrealmoney.com
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The Realist
How To Barter Your Way Out of the Depression April 27, 2009 – Brett Buchanan Four years ago most Americans believed only good economic times were ahead. We were all swimming in equity. Financial markets constantly tested new highs. Being unemployed was mostly a choice. Aside from the unfortunate circumstance of war we found ourselves in - all systems were good-to-go. Today, most Americans see only uncertain economic times ahead. No one is swimming in equity. Financial markets constantly test new lows. Unemployment lurks around every corner. And unfortunately we still find ourselves in a state of war. What lies ahead on the economic horizon is anyone’s guess. Looking back, the path to this catastrophe began in the Clinton administration, cruised through Bush, and has now landed on Obama’s lap, who has surrounded himself with the Clinton alumni that helped set the course into our present quagmire. Our leaders in government, at the Fed, and in the private sector failed miserably in their responsibility to see this crisis coming. They were asleep at the wheel. Catatonic as the car careened off the cliff even now they would deny the crash ever happened if they could manipulate the data well enough. So if our leaders failed to see the proverbial curve in the road, what makes you think they have any clue about what lies ahead? There exists such a vast disconnect between the power base in America and the rest of us that I don’t think too many people would disagree there are in fact two Americas - a small concentrated one that rules, and a vast subservient one that obeys. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the
1
America I signed up for in grade school. That a small ruling class now controls our government through the strong arm of centrally planned monetary policy and finance capitalism should be apparent to anyone with a TV or Internet access. And that this ruling class now lacks the common decency to provide the public a clear picture of what our future most likely holds is not only shameful, it’s criminal. Pundits argue that it would be irresponsible for government to warn people about the possibility of economic collapse. They would argue that it is the government’s responsibility to remain steadfast, to act as a calming force, to remain level-headed in the face of adversity so that people might not panic and demand their money from the banks or hoard food. If that’s the case, then what good is government? If they can’t warn us of a known impending catastrophe, one that they created no less, then what the hell do we need them for? To impose martial law when panic hits the streets? So what does the future hold? Anyone with some common sense can deduce that unemployment is going to get downright scary. Shadowstats.com already has real unemployment at 20% and rising. That’s one out of every five adults without a job. Imagine one out of four, or one out of three. You know what happens to shopping malls then, they close down and their parking lots turn into flea markets and barter towns. Jobs are the backbone of social stability in the US. Take the jobs away - stability goes with them. These are the things our government should be preparing us for. And if you think I’m insane, think again. Because I guarantee you that tucked away in some corner of CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, in a room where five brainiacs used to conduct mock missile exchanges with the Soviet Union, those same guys are now theorizing about what would happen in American cities if unemployment hits twenty-five or thirty percent by the end of 2010. Let me tell you, they’re not thinking we’re all going to come together and hold hands in a circle around the campfire as we belt out passionate renditions of God Bless America.
2
They’re thinking about how to round up our guns. As unemployment climbs throughout 2009 two things will occur. One, those people still employed will spend less. Two, the newly unemployed will burn through their savings. When the savings of the newly unemployed dries up, when there are no more 401k funds to tap, when the Pee-PiP plan and all these other hair-brained schemes have transferred another trillion or ten in equity loss from the banks to the public, when your neighbor’s house is fire-selling to a carpet-bagger for half what you owe on your mortgage, when people just flat out refuse to pay interest on overpriced assets anymore, that’s when you see collapse. ARM resets are coming. The jobs situation is becoming obvious. By the end of 2009 the American economy will have deteriorated to the extent that there is no more hiding it. Our government will be talking deal on our external debt. Holders of US dollar reserves will be pissed. Think China. Dollar collapses, US debt defaults, bingo, game over. USA bankrupt. Look at the American experiment as one big bubble. Rome was a bubble. The British Empire was a bubble. Nazi Germany, bubble. Soviet Union, bubble. USA, bubble. Here is our situation. Public debt is out of control with federal expenses going parabolic while tax revenues are plummeting. The combination of which renders the Obama administration deficit projections for fiscal year 2010 and beyond laughably incorrect. Furthermore, the bailout costs are much worse than anyone is willing to admit. Even if we did skate by without an all-out collapse when you tally up the real numbers on; mortgage write-downs, consumer credit write-downs, derivatives losses, direct bailouts and stimulus, municipal bailouts, (you know those are coming), and other bailouts and stimulus that we haven’t even imagined yet but will most definitely rear their ugly head, we’re flirting with five, seven, maybe as much as ten trillion dollars that will be added to the US Treasury’s debit column. When George W. took office the national debt was $5.7 trillion dollars. When he left office it exceeded $10
3
trillion. Are you ready for $20 trillion dollars of national debt? You better be, because it’s coming. You can bet your paycheck on it – Obama just did, literally, he bet your paycheck on it. My question is this. What are the Federal Reserve and US Treasury going to do when the waiter brings the final bill to the table? Pass it to us? Sorry Ben, my credit card’s tapped. A PhD economist friend of mine, Paul Boyce, aka Doc, sent me an essay written by Dmitry Orlov titled Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century. It’s the kind of reading that sticks with you for a day or two - and not in a good way. The essay exposes similarities and differences between the pre-collapse Soviet Union and present-day America. A few things jumped off the page at me. One, those vodka-chugging Russkies sure got a lot of oil. They’re energy rich. Two, nobody got displaced from their homes when big red collapsed - they were all living in government housing to begin with. Three, the USSR’s centrally-planned cities had good public transportation that everyone simply continued using even as their world crumbled around them. And four, Russians were pretty much used to life sucking anyway. I mean let’s be honest, they never had as much stuff or as much freedom as us Ugly-Americans. The point is this. When our system collapses we don’t have any oil. We will be displaced from our homes. Our mass public transit may as well be two pregnant donkeys and a busted cart. Face it, we’re not used to life sucking. So when a collapse hits you’re going to see a lot of stunned folks walking the streets mumbling about how the Federal Reserve was supposed to maintain stable prices and economic growth. No one will understand that the Debt-Taxation-Inflation model the Fed used to perpetuate their siphon-from-the-bottom scheme was in fact the cause of all our ills. 2009 is shaping up to be the year of reckoning. 2010 could be the year of civil unrest. Here is where we should take our lesson from the Russians. Go buy cases of bar soap and staple toiletries. Razors, condoms, tampons, the kinds of things American soldiers used to bring over from the states during
4
World War II to lure French chicks into bed. Pile canned goods in the closet under your stairs. Buy it all in bulk and get ready to be the guy on your block everyone comes to in trade. And remember, women will do anything for 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. I’m talking about chores you pervert. The question of our time is this. Will the injection of trillions of dollars through stimulus and bailouts into the US and global economies stave off disaster? As I said before, our leaders didn’t see the crisis coming, they miscalculated it when it hit, and their only answer has been to throw newly printed money into the credit funnel. Anyone could do that. To believe that our leaders have a realistic handle on the ultimate outcome of these acts of desperation is to believe Rush Limbaugh is a closet liberal. If you take away one thing from this read take away this – it was the creditbased monetary system that got us into this mess. Why pour more money into the top of that funnel? We don’t need more bank credit. We need more real money at the bottom Mr. Obama. Now that would have been an act of Change. All those trillions of dollars you’ve committed and will continue to commit to the planet’s biggest losers, the banks and corporations that have taken so much from our world, you could have just written checks directly to the American people. But I suppose when your Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel worked for the primary dealer Dresdner Kleinwort and your Chief Economic Advisor is Larry Summers, no background needed there – he’s the devil, then the idea of helping the little guy first really isn’t an option, is it? The jury’s still out on you Mr. Obama, and they’re getting restless. Within the last few weeks a surge in political activism has overwhelmed the nation. For now the mainstream media, with the exception of Fox News, has painted the efforts of disgruntled Americans as mostly coming from the right. I disagree. I attended a Tea Party and I can tell you firsthand the majority of people there were simply fed up with a power structure that
5
continually holds the public down while we get gang-raped by the moneyed elite. The fight this nation faces is not a fight between the right and left. It is a war of the people against the fusion of money and government – you know, those two bedfellows inextricably glued together by the Federal Reserve. My battle is to get people on both sides of the political fence to lay down their conservative and liberal monikers and just be Americans, at least until we reign-in the Fed. On that note, the esteemed Peter Schiff gave a keynote address at an Abolish the Fed rally in New York City, April 25th. Schiff had this to say, “The Federal Reserve was behind all of it and we’re not going to get to the root of our economic problems unless we get to the root cause, which is the Federal Reserve and the phony monetary system we now have.” Personally, I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am not a Libertarian. I am not left or right of any persuasion. I am a God damned human being. And most importantly I am a freethinking realist. And I don’t have any control over what the thin layer of authority in this nation is doing to our future. Did I say thin layer? I meant Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner. They’re running our country in case you weren’t aware. It’s time we woke up and started acting like responsible citizens. It’s time we realize we are one people. We The People – doesn’t anyone get chills when they hear those words anymore? I do. I recently read the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. You know what I learned? Thomas Jefferson is the most brilliant son-of-a-bitch that ever lived. His words are the reason that so many millions of people over the last two hundred plus years have done anything in their power to escape the clutches of tyranny in lands far away and made arduous journeys just to set foot on our soil. I am so proud of my country when I think of what our forefathers penned on those pages of hemp and gave to the world at risk of their own lives.
6
After I’d read our Constitution and Bill of Rights there is one truth I know. No one will ever separate me from my fellow Americans - not Rush Limbaugh, not Sean Penn, not Ted Turner, and not Ann Coulter. I agree with no one who puts their politics before the beliefs of other people. We all come from such a diverse landscape of experience that shapes who we are and what we feel. These are the things we should value in one another. These are the things we should embrace. Our diversity is our strength. But the manufactured political frequencies emanating from our flat screens and newsstands only divide us. Show me one major media outlet that aims to unite us and I’ll show you a direct lineage to our founding framework. The Federal Reserve counts on two things for its survival. One, our ignorance with respect to money creation and the Fed’s Debt-TaxationInflation model that erodes our wealth and inflates the moneyed class’s balance sheets every minute of every day and two, our ignorance again with respect to the moneyed class’s manipulation of the media, of which they control, into dividing an entire nation right down the middle with both sides hating the other, blinded by hollow rhetoric that when you strip away the façade reveals people that aren’t so different after all. But we’re too afraid of each other to admit it. The Plutocrats count on our ignorance for their survival. They believe we’re too stupid to understand the complexities of modern banking - so best keep the Fed meetings secret. And we’ve never had an original thought in our lives so why not feed us a bunch of blue and red hype through the left and right media and then sit back while the masses bicker amongst themselves over trivial social issues. Meanwhile, they rob an entire planet blind. And when the bubbles pop they whack us over the head again with the government bailout stick. If we really want to do something about our future, if we really want to take back the liberty we know has been usurped from us by the moneyed elite
7
and their bidders in congress and the White House, then you have to take down their power base – the Federal Reserve. Without the Fed, sound money can be restored. Boom-bust can become a notation in history books. And we can all sit back, drink wine, cast a line in a stream, go hunting, save a tree, or do anything else it is us crazy Americans do in our spare time. Below is a link to sign the Petition to Abolish the Federal Reserve – among other links. Congressman Ron Paul is at the root of this effort. I endorse Ron Paul only to the extent of his efforts to bring down the Fed. Go to the site. Read. Sign. Subscribe to my feed. Email me and tell me I’m a loon. Worship me. Loathe me. I don’t care. Just take some action. http://www.petitiononline.com/fed/petition.html - Petition to Abolish the Fed http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co.../cr091002b.htm - Ron Paul speech 2002 http://ronpaul.com - Unofficial Ron Paul site http://endthefedusa.ning.com/ - End The Fed USA http://thenewamerican.com - The New American Contact the author at; brettbuchanan@yahoo.com Web-Site; http://itsnotrealmoney.com
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