Year: 2013

Uttin’ on the Itz

Outside the Box: Uttin’ on the Itz

By John Mauldin

 

Last Thursday, prior to the FOMC announcement, I was having an early lunch with Kyle Bass so he could get back to the office in time for the announcement. As we were finishing up, I was invited to come sit with another group of friends and traders who also happened to be in the same restaurant. Everyone was sure there would be some type of tapering. That message had been clearly communicated to the markets. When the announcement came, the telephones went off and everyone erupted with various forms of surprise. I fully admit to being speechless. I kept waiting for some kind of explanation, and none came. The more we talked about it and the more I thought about it later, the more convinced I became that this was one of the more ham-handed policy announcements from the Fed in a very long time. Why would you go to the trouble of getting the market all ready for the onset of tapering, build expectations, and then jerk out the rug? What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on?

I’ve been with Louis Gave and David Rosenberg this weekend here in Toronto. Everyone is searching for an answer on the FOMC’s move. Louis came up with what I’m affectionately calling his conspiracy theory. He thinks Obama is quite upset that he can’t have Summers as Fed chair and that his staff is crossways with Yellen. Reports suggest she has not even been interviewed yet. Really? If that’s the case then perhaps Obama would rather stick with Bernanke for another two years and then make another try for Summers or maybe even a rested Geithner. Steve Cucchiaro (of $18.5 billion-under-management Windhaven fame) asked if Summers had maybe communicated through back channels to Bernanke that he wanted to end the tapering, and Bernanke was helping him out; but then when he was no longer in the running for Fed chair, Janet Yellen came and said, “Ben, I’m not ready to end tapering yet,” so Bernanke took one for the team.

I heard directly from another friend that he was in the offices of one of the world’s largest bond managers, and they had actually been at the Fed the previous week and were confident there would be a small tapering. Did you see the way bonds got ripped after the announcement? These bond managers were pissed (that’s a technical economics term). Can we trust the Fed now? Years of work building transparency and a confidence in the narrative, and then they blow it on a meaningless non-taper?

This week’s Outside the Box is from Ben Hunt. It echoes some of my own concerns about the Fed and raises others. Quoting:

Two things happened this week with the FOMC announcement and subsequent press conferences by Bernanke, Bullard, etc. – one procedural and one structural. The procedural event was the intentional injection of ambiguity into Fed communications. As I’ll describe below, this is an even greater policy mistake than the initial “Puttin’ on the Ritz” show Bernanke produced at the June FOMC meeting when “tapering” first entered our collective vocabulary. The structural event … which is far more important, far more long-lasting, and just plain sad … is the culmination of the bureaucratic capture of the Federal Reserve, not by the banking industry which it regulates, but by academic economists and acolytes of government paternalism. These are true-believers in too-clever-by-half academic theories such as management of forward expectations and in the soft authoritarianism of Mandarin rule. They are certain that they have both a duty and an ability to regulate the global economy in the best interests of the rest of us poor benighted souls.

This is one of the more incendiary OTBs in a while, and I think you should set aside some time to think on the implications Ben is writing about.

One of the important things the Federal Reserve provides when there is a crisis is that sense that “daddy’s home.”. Whether or not you personally believe the Fed has any significant power to actually do anything, the general market does believe it, and that’s the important thing. Now the Fed is at significant risk of damaging its reputation for decisiveness and clarity. We can only hope there is not another crisis coming out of Asia or Europe in the next few months that would require Federal Reserve action. What could they do now that would actually be credible? And while I don’t see a crisis developing in a short timeframe, it is the things that we don’t see, the Lions in the Grass, that create so many problems. Just saying…

I am at the airport in Toronto as I write this note. Tonight I get to have dinner with my friends Art Cashin, Barry Ritholtz, Barry Habib, Rich Yamarone, Christian Menegatti, and David Rosenberg; and Jack Rivkin may show up a little later. Ian Bremmer is supposed to drop by for early drinks before he heads off for dinner with Prime Minister Abe of Japan. It looks like it will be a spirited evening, with lots to talk about. I am not sure what I will write about this weekend, but I bet I’ll get a few ideas this evening.

And speaking of the venerable Art Cashin, I will not be the only one at the table tonight who is mystified by the Fed’s action. And apparently some members of the FOMC agree with Art and me. Art wrote this morning:

 Candor With A Capital C – Yet Again – One of the Fed speakers yesterday was the President of the Dallas Fed, Mr. Richard Fisher.  Mr. Fisher is a favorite of floor traders since, when he speaks, the message is clear, not couched in monetary argot.  He didn’t deviate from that habit at all yesterday.

His speech was on current banking trends and a post-Lehman review.  He said that too big to fail banks were “a dagger pointed at the heart of the economy.”  At the end of his speech he said:

A Deliberate Deflection

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, I am going to try to avoid answering questions you might have about last week’s FOMC meeting and what some in the press have now labeled “the taper caper.” Nearly every Federal Reserve Bank president and his or her sister will be speaking to this topic this week, so you will be getting an earful of cacophonous comments on this subject.

Today, I will simply say that I disagreed with the decision of the committee and argued against it. Here is a direct quote from the summation of my intervention at the table during the policy “go round” when Chairman [Ben] Bernanke called on me to speak on whether or not to taper: “Doing nothing at this meeting would increase uncertainty about the future conduct of policy and call the credibility of our communications into question.” I believe that is exactly what has occurred, though I take no pleasure in saying so.

While he may have deflected further questioning on the “taper caper,” he did not deflect all questions.  Again his candor brought headlines.  Here’s a bit from Bloomberg on the Fed Chair succession:

“The White House has mishandled this terribly,” Fisher said today in response to a question from the audience after giving a speech in San Antonio, Texas. “This should not be a public debate,” he said, adding that the Fed “must never be a political instrument.”

On another question, Mr. Fisher apparently said that although Janet Yellen was dead wrong in her policy direction, she would make a great Chair.

We doubt that Mr. Fisher ever hears the question, “What exactly do you mean by that?”  We could use more such candor elsewhere.

You have yourself a good week, and I’ll report back. And now sit down while we hear from Ben Hunt.

Your wishing he knew what was going on in Bernanke’s head analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box[email protected]

Uttin’ On the Itz

By Ben Hunt, Ph.D.

High hats and arrowed collars, white spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime, for a wonderful time
If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to
Why don’t you go where fashion sits,
Puttin’ on the Ritz.
– Irving Berlin

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
– Karl Marx

I never could bear the idea of anyone expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
– Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit”

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human.
– Albert Camus

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
– Arthur Miller

In Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder brilliantly reformulate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a tragedy in the classic sense, as farce. The narrative crux of the Brooks/Wilder movie is Dr. Frankenstein’s demonstration of his creation to an audience of scientists – not with some clinical presentation, but by both Doctor and Monster donning top hats and tuxedos to perform “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in true vaudevillian style. The audience is dazzled at first, but the cheers turn to boos when the Monster is unable to stay in tune, bellowing out “UTTIN ON THE IIIITZ!” and dancing frantically. Pelted with rotten tomatoes, the Monster flees the stage and embarks on a doomed rampage.

Wilder’s Frankenstein accomplishes an amazing feat – he creates life! – but then he uses that fantastic gift to put on a show. So, too, with QE. These policies saved the world in early 2009. Now they are a farce, a show put on by well-meaning scientists who have never worked a day outside government or academia, who have zero intuition for, knowledge of, or experience with the consequences of their experiments.

Two things happened this week with the FOMC announcement and subsequent press conferences by Bernanke, Bullard, etc. – one procedural and one structural. The procedural event was the intentional injection of ambiguity into Fed communications. As I’ll describe below, this is an even greater policy mistake that the initial “Puttin’ on the Ritz” show Bernanke produced at the June FOMC meeting when “tapering” first entered our collective vocabulary. The structural event … which is far more important, far more long-lasting, and just plain sad … is the culmination of the bureaucratic capture of the Federal Reserve, not by the banking industry which it regulates, but by academic economists and acolytes of government paternalism. These are true-believers in too-clever-by-half academic theories such as management of forward expectations and in the soft authoritarianism of Mandarin rule. They are certain that they have both a duty and an ability to regulate the global economy in the best interests of the rest of us poor benighted souls. Anyone else remember “The Committee to Save the World” (Feb. 1999)? The hubris levels of current Fed and Treasury leaders make Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers seem almost humble in comparison, as hard as that may be to believe. The difference is that the guys on the left operated in the real world, where usually you were right but sometimes you were wrong in a clearly demonstrable fashion. A professional academic like Bernanke or Yellen has never been wrong. Published papers and books are not held accountable because nothing is riding on them, and this internal assumption of intellectual infallibility follows wherever they go. As a former cleric in this Church, I know wherefore I speak.

There’s frequent hand-wringing among the chattering class about whether or not the Fed has been “politicized.” Please. That horse left the barn decades ago. In fact, with the possible exception of Paul Volcker (and even he is an accomplished political animal) I am hard pressed to identify any Fed Chairman who has not incorporated into monetary policy the political preferences of whatever Administration happened to be in power at the time.

Bureaucratic capture is not politicization. It is the subversion of a regulatory body, a transformation in motives and objectives from within. In this case it includes an element of politicization, to be sure, but the structural change goes much deeper than that. Politicization is a skin-deep phenomenon; with every change in Administration there is some commensurate change, usually incremental, in policy application. Bureaucratic capture, on the other hand, marks a more or less permanent shift in the existential purpose of an institution. The WHY of the Fed – its meaning – changed this week. Or rather, it’s been changing for a long time and now has been officially presented via a song-and-dance routine.

What Bernanke signaled this week is that QE is no longer an emergency government measure, but is now a permanent government program. In exactly the same way that retirement and poverty insurance became permanent government programs in the aftermath of the Great Depression, so now is deflation and growth insurance well on its way to becoming a permanent government program in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The rate of asset purchases may wax and wane in the years to come, and might even be negative for short periods of time, but the program itself will never be unwound.

There is very little difference from a policy efficacy perspective between announcing a small taper of, say, a $10 billion reduction in monthly bond purchases and announcing no taper at all. But there is a HUGE difference from a policy signaling perspective between the two. Doing nothing, particularly when everyone expects you to do something, is a signal, pure and simple. It is an intentional insertion of uncertainty into forward expectations, a clear communication that the self-imposed standards for winding down QE as established in June are no longer operative, that the market should assume nothing in terms of winding down QE.

Think of it this way … why didn’t the Fed satisfy market expectations, their prior communications, and their own stated desire to wait cautiously for more economic data by imposing a minuscule $5 billion taper? Almost every market participant would have been happy with this outcome, from those hoping for more accommodation for longer to those hoping that finally, at last, we were on a path to unwind QE. Everyone could find something to like here. But no, the FOMC went out of its way to signal something else. And that something else is that we are NOT on automatic pilot to unwind QE. A concern with self- sustaining growth and a professed desire to be “data dependent” are satisfied equally with either a small taper or doing nothing. Choosing nothing over a small taper is only useful insofar as it signals that the Fed prefers to maintain a QE program regardless of the economic data. And that’s a position that almost every market participant can find a reason to dislike, as we’ve seen over the past few days. I mean … when even Fed apologist extraordinaire Jon Hilsenrath starts to complain about Fed communications (although his latest article title remains “Market Misreads Signals”), you know that you have a Fed whose preference functions are not identical to the market’s.

Moreover, Bernanke and his team are taking steps to prevent future FOMC’s or Fed Chairs from reversing this transformation of QE from emergency policy to government program. In addition to the implicit signal given by choosing no taper over a small taper, there was an explicit signal in both Bernanke’s comments on Wednesday and in Bullard’s interviews on Friday – the Fed is adding an inflation floor to its QE linkages, alongside the existing unemployment linkage. Previously we were told that QE would persist so long as unemployment is high. Now we are told that QE will also persist so long as inflation is low. Importantly, these are being presented as individually sufficient reasons for QE persistence. If unemployment is high OR inflation is low, QE rolls on. Precedent matters a lot to any clubby, self- consciously deliberative Washington body, from the Supreme Court to the Senate to the FOMC, and by setting multiple explicit macroeconomic linkages to QE – all of which are one-way thresholds designed to continue asset purchases – this Fed is making it much harder for any future Fed to reverse course.

But wait, there’s more …

Given the manner in which inflation statistics are constructed today – and just read Janet Yellen’s book (The Fabulous Decade: Macroeconomic Lessons from the 1990’s, co-authored with Alan Blinder) if you think that the Fed is unaware of the policy impact that statistical construction can achieve … changing inflation measurement methodology is one of the key factors she identifies to explain how the Fed was able to engineer the growth “miracle” of the 1990’s – inflation is now more of a proxy for generic economic activity than it is for how prices are experienced. In a very real way (no pun intended), the meaning and construction of concepts such as real economic growth and real rates of return are shifting beneath our feet, but that’s a story for another day. What’s relevant today is that when the Fed promises continued QE so long as inflation is below target, they are really promising continued QE so long as economic growth is anemic. QE has become just another tool to manage the business cycle and garden- variety recession risks. And because those risks are always present, QE will always be with us.

In Pulp Fiction the John Travolta character plunges a syringe of adrenaline into Uma Thurman’s heart to save her life. This was QE in March, 2009 … an emergency, once in a lifetime effort to revive an economy in cardiac arrest. Now, four and a half years later, QE is adrenaline delivered via IV drip … a therapeutic, constant effort to maintain a certain quality of economic life. This may or may not be a positive development for Wall Street, depending on where you sit. I would argue that it’s a negative development for most individual and institutional investors. But it is music to the ears of every institutional political interest in Washington, regardless of party, and that’s what ultimately grants QE bureaucratic immortality.

It is impossible to overestimate the political inertia that exists within and around these massive Federal insurance programs, just as it is impossible to overestimate the electoral popularity (or market popularity, in the case of QE) of these programs. In the absence of a self-imposed wind-down plan – and that’s exactly what Bernanke laid out in June and exactly what he took back on Wednesday – there is no chance of any other governmental entity unwinding QE, even if they wanted to. Which they don’t. Regardless of what political party may sit in the White House or control Congress in the years to come, it will be as practically impossible and politically unthinkable to eliminate QE as it is to eliminate Social Security or food stamps. QE is now a creature of Washington, forever and ever, amen.

The long-term consequences of this structural change in the Fed are immense and deserve many future Epsilon Theory notes. But in the short to medium-term it’s the procedural shifts that have been signaled this week that will impact markets. What does it mean for market behavior that Bernanke intentionally delivered an informational shock by forcing uncertainty into market expectations?

First, it’s important to note that this is not really an issue of credibility. The problem is not that people don’t believe that Bernanke means what he said on Wednesday, or that they won’t believe him if he says something different in October. The problem is that the Fed is entirely believable, but that the message is not one of “constructive ambiguity” as the academic papers written by Fed advisors intend, but one of vacillation and weakness of will.

From a game theoretic perspective, ambiguity can be a very effective strategy in pretty much whatever game you are playing. Alan Greenspan was a master of this approach, famous for the lack of clarity in his public statements. Other well-known practitioners of intentionally opaque statements include Mao Zedong (hilariously lampooned in Doonesbury when Uncle Duke had a short-lived stint as the US Ambassador to China) as well as most Kremlin communications in the Soviet era. Clarity and transparency can also be a very effective strategy in pretty much any game, particularly if you’re playing a strong hand or you want to make sure that your partner follows your lead. For example, throughout the Cold War both the Americans and the Russians would place certain strategic assets in plain sight of the other country’s surveillance apparatus so that there would be no mistaking the strength and intent of the signal.

The key to the success of both strategies – intentional ambiguity and intentional clarity – is consistency and, very rarely, the “gotcha” moment of a strategy switch. To use a poker analogy, the tight player who has a reputation for never bluffing can take down a big pot with a bluff much more easily than a player who is impossible to read and has a reputation as a frequent bluffer. Of course, this bluff can only be used once in a blue moon or the reputation for being a tight player will be lost, as will future bluffing effectiveness. Also, the reputation as a tight player must be established effectively prior to the first bluff.

To stick with the poker analogy, here’s my take on what the Fed has done. For the past four months, they’ve tried to create a reputation as a tight player, meaning that they have laid out fairly clear standards for how they will interpret labor data (the equivalent of cards dealt face up) to set the extent and timing of QE tapering. The market responded as it always does, setting its expectations on the basis of the Fed’s statements, and moving up or down as each new labor data card was revealed. But then on Wednesday, the Fed revealed a bluff to win … nothing … and announced that they would now be playing in an unpredictable fashion. It was almost as if Bernanke had read a beginner’s poker instruction book when he was at Jackson Hole in late August that said you have to be a hard-to-read player who bluffs a lot to succeed at poker, and decided as a result to change his entire strategy. I don’t know what you would think about a player like that in your poker game, but words like “weak”, “fish”, and “donkey” come to my mind.

In fact, I think that the poker instruction book metaphor is just barely a metaphor, because we know that several papers at Jackson Hole took Bernanke to task for his communication policy to date. For example, Jean-Pierre Landau, a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of France and currently in residence at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, presented a paper focused on the systemic risks of the massive liquidity sloshing around courtesy of the world’s central banks. For the most part it’s a typical academic paper in the European mold, finding a solution to systemic risks in even greater supra-national government controls over capital flows, leverage, and risk taking. But here’s the interesting point:

“Zero interest rates make risk taking cheap; forward guidance makes it free, by eliminating all roll-over risk on short term funding positions. … Forward guidance brings the cost of leverage to zero, and creates strong incentives to increase and overextend exposures. This makes financial intermediaries very sensitive to “news”, whatever they are.”

Landau is saying that the very act of forward guidance, while well-intentioned, is counter-productive if your goal is long-term systemic stability. There is an inevitable shock when that forward guidance shifts, and that shock is magnified because you’ve trained the market to rely so heavily on forward guidance, both in its risk-taking behavior (more leverage) and its reaction behavior (more sensitivity to “news”). This argument was picked up by the WSJ (“Did Fed’s Forward Guidance Backfire?”), and it continued to get a lot of play in early September, both within the financial press and from FOMC members such as Narayana Kocherlakota.

I think that Bernanke took these papers and comments to heart … after all, they come from fellow trusted members of the academic club … and decided to change course with communication policy. No more clearly stated forward guidance, but rather the oh-so-carefully crafted ambiguity of an Alan Greenspan. Here would be a Monster that can sing and dance, one that can be trotted on stage in a tux and tails and is sure to delight the audience with a little number by Irving Berlin. What could possibly go wrong? Well, the same thing as the first performance back in June – a complete misunderstanding of the real-world environment into which these signals are injected.

At least in June the Fed still projected an aura of resolve. Today even that seems missing, and that’s a very troubling development. Creating a stable Narrative is a function of inserting the right public statement signals into the Common Knowledge game. As described above, it really doesn’t matter what the Party line is, so long as it is delivered with confidence, consistency, and from on high. But once the audience starts questioning the magician’s sleight-of-hand mechanics, once the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz is forced to say “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”, the magician has an audience perception problem. Fair or not, there is now      a question of competence around Fed policy and its decision-making process. Sure the Monster can sing, but can it sing well?

Unfortunately, I think that this perception of an irresolute, somewhat confused Fed is poised to accelerate in the forthcoming nomination proceedings for a new Chair, not dissipate. If strength of will and resolve of purpose is the quality you need to project, then the Fed needs a Strongman on a Horse:

not a Wise Oracle Baking Cookies.

Sorry, but it’s true.

I mean, does anyone doubt that Janet Yellen is a consensus builder who would feel more at home at a faculty tea with Elizabeth Warren than a come-to-Jesus talk with Zhou Xiaochuan? Does anyone doubt that Larry Summers is the polar opposite, a bureaucratic Napoleon who would absolutely revel in lowering the boom on Zhou or Tombini … or Bullard or Yellen, for that matter? But it looks like Yellen is the shoo- in candidate, so whatever perceptions of Fed wishy-washiness and indecision that are currently incubating are likely to grow, no matter how unfair those perceptions might be.

What does all this mean for how to invest in the short to medium-term? Frankly, I don’t think that “investment” is possible over the next few months, at least not as the term is usually understood, and at least not in public markets. When you listen to institutional investors and the bulge-bracket sell-side firms that serve them, everything today is couched in terms of “positioning”, not “investment”, and as a result that’s the Common Knowledge environment we all must suffer through. This is the fundamental behavioral shift in markets created by a Fed-centric universe – the best one can hope for is a modicum of protection from the caprice of the Mad God, and efforts to find some investable theme are dashed more often than they are rewarded. The Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence – that all market outcomes are determined by monetary policy, especially Fed policy – is stronger than ever today, so if you’re looking to take an exposure based on the idiosyncratic attributes or fundamentals of a publicly traded company … well, I hope you have a long time horizon and very little sensitivity to the price path in the meantime. I will say, though, that the counter-narrative of the Fed as Incompetent Magician, which is clearly growing in strength right alongside the Omnipotence Narrative, makes gold a much more attractive option than this time a year ago.

As for where all this game-playing and stage-strutting ultimately ends up, I want to close with two quotes by academics who are very far removed from the self-consciously (and self-parodying) “scientific” world view of modern economists. Weaver and Midgley are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they come to very similar conclusions. I’ll be examining the paths in which the “birds come home to roost”, to use Arthur Miller’s phrase, in future notes. I hope you will join me in that examination, and if you’d like to be on the direct distribution list for these free weekly notes please sign up at Follow Epsilon Theory.

The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
– Richard M. Weaver, “Ideas Have Consequences”

Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it’s going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.
– Mary Midgley, “The Myths We Live By”

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FAT LADY IS SINGING AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS

I hate saying I told you so. No I don’t. I love saying I told you so. I wrote my first article about JC Penney being  a future bankruptcy in early 2012.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2012/05/15/j-c-penny-bug-meet-windshield/

I’ve written multiple posts since then.

The Wall Street shysters have continued to tout this piece of shit as a buy the whole way down. The stock is now down 45% on the year and down 75% since I wrote my first article warning of their demise. They are done. Their suppliers will not supply them with the inventory they need for Christmas unless they get paid up front. JC Penney is hemorrhaging cash. They don’t have it. They will be filing for bankruptcy shortly after their horrible holiday sales hit the presses.

There will be 1,100 vacant rotting hulks in dying malls across America. Maybe they can be converted into Soup Kitchens R Us. That is where the 150,000 JC Penney employees will be going after they get fired in the next six months. The fat lady is belting out a tune.

JCP Craters To Single-Digits As Specter Of Bankruptcy Filing Rises

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/25/2013 10:39 -0400

Why is JCP down nearly 16% this morning? JCP now trades sub-$10   Here’s why: As we reported in detail yesterday, as part of Goldman’s Buy JCP CDS reco, the firm conducted this recovery analysis on the unsecured bonds. Its best case recovery on the unsecureds: 65% (and 13% in the worst case). Translation: equity is “impaired” in pretty much any case.

ANOTHER HEARTWARMING DRUG STORY

Erskin and Louise Fulgham

went together to be with the Lord on July 23, 2013. Erskin was born on February 5, 1926 in Mathiston, MS. Louise was born on August 27, 1929 in Maben, MS. They moved to Tucson, AZ in 1957. They were married for 67 years and long standing members of Emmanuel Baptist Church. Erskin received a bronze medal for his Army service during World War II. Erskin retired from ASARCO and Louise from The University of Arizona Athletic Department. They are survived by son, Mike Fulgham; daughters, Glenda Kim, Jeanette Barger (Harvey) and Beth Fulgham; brothers, Monroe Dewberry, Hubert Fulgham (Catherine) and Henry Fulgham (Beverly); sister, Annie Lee Young; many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Services will be held Thursday, August 1, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. at EAST LAWN PALMS MORTUARY, 5801 E. Grant Rd. In lieu of flowers, donations to Honor Flight or Emmanuel Baptist Church.

(as published in the Arizona Daily Star, July 31, 2013)

Just another obituary, right? Not quite. Among the “many grandchildren” who survived Erskin, age 87 and in very frail health, and Mary Louise, age 83, was a grandson named Kyle Austin Drattlo, age 20. On July 24, the day after Erskin and Mary Louise died, Kyle and two companions, 23-year-old Christopher Edward Terry and 21-year-old Brianna Harding, were stopped for speeding in Tonapah, Nevada.

The Nevada State Police officer ran a check on the 2004 Buick they were driving. It had been reported by the Tucson Police as stolen in Tucson in connection with a murder investigation, and its owners were listed as Erskin and Louise Fulgham. Drattlo insisted to the officer that his grandparents gave him permission to use the car. So the officer then asked the trio where they were headed, and they told him they were going to a family reunion in Wyoming. One big problem. They were headed AWAY from Wyoming when they were stopped. All three were arrested and sent back to Arizona, where they were shortly charged with first-degree murder.

Here’s the part that will give you a warm, fuzzy feeling. Mary Louise Fulgham had been brutally and repeatedly stabbed to death in the chair in which she sat in her living room. Erskin Fulgham evidently saw the attack on his wife and tried to go to her aid. He didn’t make it out of the kitchen, where he too was stabbed and STOMPED AND KICKED to death by his attacker(s). The stomping was so severe that Erskin’s ribs were broken and his teeth knocked out of his mouth.

But wait, there’s more. Evidently, another grandson of Erskin and Mary Louise stopped in on the afternoon of their murder to check up on his “Nana and Papa,” which happens to be what our grandchildren refer to my wife and me. The front door of their home in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood was unlocked. He walked in and saw Nana slumped in her chair and thought she was napping. As he got closer, he saw the blood. Then he looked into the kitchen and saw the blood-splattered and severely beaten body of his Papa lying on the floor. Now, didn’t that brighten his, and your, day?

Details of this grisly double murder continue to trickle out. Evidently, grandson Drattlo and his male companion Christopher Terry are cooperating by pointing the finger at each other as to who actually committed the murders. That will help neither of them in the long run.

But here’s the really interesting part. Just today it was reported, again in the Arizona Daily Star, that Brianna Harding told police that all three of them were heavy users of Spice. She told police that they smoked Spice to the tune of 6 bags a day, at $20/bag. WTF is Spice, I asked myself? Here’s the answer, and you pot supporters won’t like it.

Synthetic cannabis is a psychoactive designer drug created by spraying natural herbs with synthetic chemicals that, when consumed, allegedly mimic the effects of cannabis. It is often known by the brand names K2 and Spice.

Research on the safety of synthetic cannabis is now becoming available. Initial studies are focused on the role of synthetic cannabis in psychosis. Synthetic cannabis may precipitate psychosis and in some cases it may be prolonged. Some studies suggest that synthetic cannabinoid intoxication is associated with acute psychosis, worsening of previously stable psychotic disorders, and it may trigger a chronic (long-term) psychotic disorder among vulnerable individuals such as those with a family history of mental illness.
When synthetic cannabis blends first went on sale in the early 2000s, it was thought that they achieved an effect through a mixture of legal herbs. Laboratory analysis in 2008 showed that this is not the case, and that they in fact contain synthetic cannabinoids that act on the body in a similar way to cannabinoids naturally found in cannabis, such as THC. It has been sold under various brand names, online, in head shops, and at some gas stations.

On November 24, 2010, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced it would use emergency powers to ban many synthetic cannabinoids within a month. In the US, as of March 1, 2011, five cannabinoids have been placed on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (and are therefore illegal to possess or use in the US); the Drug Enforcement Administration claims that said action is “to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety.” In July 2012, the Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act of 2012 was signed into law. It banned synthetic compounds commonly found in synthetic marijuana, placing them under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.

P.S. I refuse to post any pictures of the animals who killed Erskin and Mary Louise Fulgham. Instead I want you to look at the helpless VICTIMS, married for 67 years, who suffered a horrifying and painful death.

Erskin and Louise Fulgham

The Pusher Has Made Us All Junkies

By: Monty Pelerin

http://www.economicnoise.com/2013/09/22/pusher-made-us-junkies/

A recent post on this site described the Federal Reserve (not Goldman Sachs) as the true vampire squid.

A Predator By Intent

At the Fed’s founding, a few astute critics saw the Ponzi Scheme that it represented. Congressman Lindbergh had this to say:

This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President [Wilson} signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized….the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill. — Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. , 1913

fedtbankersdees

Lindbergh was hardly alone. Here is another comment by a legislator:

We have, in this country, one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board. This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it. — Congressman Louis T. McFadden in 1932 (Rep. Pa)

These were two of several US legislators who objected vehemently to the creation and operations of the Federal Reserve.

 

These objectors were neither prescient nor lucky in their assessment of central banking. Central banking had always been the goal of the monied and financial classes. The most successful banking empire stated:

The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it’s profits or so dependant on it’s favors, that there will be no opposition from that class. — Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

This position was stated a half-century before the Federal Reserve was instituted.

Today’s Federal Reserve

Today Fed critics are growing to a large and vocal force. Before this crisis ends, I suspect that many more will have joined this group.

The Fed is at a critical point, one would hope an existential one, in its history. Its necessity and value are no longer blindly assumed. Its ability to affect positive economic outcomes are correctly seriously in doubt. Its importance and necessity are under fire.

The Fed is now beginning to be likened to the phony wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.” It increasingly is disbelieved in its claims and seen by a large minority of the population as a charlatan. Ron Paul is responsible for getting his views through to the masses, including popularizing the notion that the Fed is an evil force rather than one for good.

The Fed reached a decision point recently regarding its QE policy. They came to a fork in the road and, in effect, punted. The left fork represented additional stimulus while the right was a reduction in stimulus. The Fed did nothing. It was paralyzed and chose neither fork. They still stand at this juncture, unsure of which path to take.

The Reason For Paralysis

The Fed should never have set out on this road to perdition. At this point neither fork is palatable. That is because of the dependency effects created by monetary expansion. Alasdair MacLeod describes the problem:

What is not generally appreciated is that once a central bank starts to use monetary expansion as a cure-all it is extremely difficult for it to stop. This is the basic reason the Fed has not pursued the idea, and why it most probably never will.

Years ago, I remember Milton Friedman discussing the point made by Mr. MacLeod. Friedman was careful to distinguish between the level of the money supply and the rate of change in the money supply. He believed that the rate of change was the important variable in regard to short-term economic activity. A decrease in the rate of money production, in Friedman’s opinion, would slow economic activity.

That summary is an oversimplification of Friedman’s position. Friedman did not believe that changes in the money supply could influence economic activity in any long-term sense. To the extent that changes in the rate of money creation surprised the public, economic actors would be forced to alter their expectations and behavior. That view was the basis of McLeod’s comment.

 

The Fed Will Stop, One Way Or Another

The Fed will stop. That is a certainty. When and whether they stop willingly or markets stop them is a different issue. The Fed stopped twice before recently, only to restart when the economy and financial assets began to slump. I suspect they will stop again, willingly but then follow the previous pattern. Whether they stop at QE4 or 5 or 8, ultimately they will stop completely or be stopped by markets.

The option of standing in place was attractive only because the two other options were deemed unacceptable. Increasing the level of stimulus was not seen as necessary (yet). It also had the disadvantage of contradicting all the optimism expressed by the political class and the Fed themselves. Decreasing the stimulus was apparently seen as too great a risk, ala the Friedman rate of change issue. Chris Martenson deals with this issue (my emboldening):

The simple truth, as I see it, is that the Fed now knows that as soon as it takes the punchbowl away, all of the apparent wealth evaporates and the market crumbles. Here we might note that if several years of truly historic money printing has not yet provided enough self-sustaining recovery, why exactly is it that the Fed thinks more of the same will do the trick?

Something just does not add up in this story. What is it that they are not telling us?

Well, one thing that really does not fit in this story is that oil over $100 per barrel. As far as I am concerned, there will be no such thing as a resumption in the type of growth the Fed wishes to see before it willingly begins tapering (end eventually unwinding), because of the price of oil and debt levels that are still far too high.

Which means the Fed will keep on printing money until something happens. More bluntly, I think the Fed will keep printing until some form of market accident happens that forces it to behave differently.

When that happens, the Fed will be following, not leading. And many will be cruelly punished for believing that the Fed had some magical ability to re-write economic laws.

The Fed As  Pusher

drugadd

The process the Fed is wrestling with is no different than that of the drug addict. After a certain point, dependency develops. Then the withdrawal process is so painful it is not willingly accepted. The drug analogy holds in other respects:

  • The addict is forced to increase doses over time to achieve the same “hit.” So too is the Fed. Holding stimulus injections at $85 billion will eventually not be enough to sustain the good feeling which currently exists. That is the point made above by Mr. MacLeod.
  • The addict cannot continue forever. Laws of nature limit the amount of punishment he can inflict on his body. Severe pain can be avoided only by substituting death as an outcome.
  • Economies have limits. Like addicts they become increasingly dysfunctional as the long-term effects of the “feel-good” drug take their toll. Distortions in prices, debt levels and capital mis-allocations are the signs of harm. That is the point the economy is at now (and probably has been for a decade or more). Real growth ceases under such conditions. We get poorer.
  • The laws of economics may be deferred, but they cannot be repealed. Economies eventually “die” just as junkies. History provides innumerable examples of governments drugging their economies to death. The economic coroner ultimately pronounces the death as either from a deflationary collapse of a hyperinflationary blow-up. Neither diagnosis is correct in terms of the cause. It is like saying a cancer patient died of heart failure.

drugadds

The drug analogy is appropriate up to a point. Here is a major problem with the analogy. The drug addict brings the outcome on himself. Those who will suffer the most for the Fed’s actions are not responsible for the pain they will endure. The Federal Reserve has “pushed” it on them in the same way that a pusher provides free drugs to kids in an attempt to hook them. In a way, one might say the criminal overlord, the Federal Government, is responsible as it directed the Federal Reserve (regardless of the “independence” myth that is so often raised).

Regardless, the pusher has made most of us junkies. We have been forced into an economic haze that seems real but is not. Whether we know it or not, we are hooked. A great “drying-out” period lies in front of us. Few have understanding of what “economic cold turkey” means, but we will all learn.

GREY CHAMPION

A Grey Champion must step forward and lead. Who will it be? Where will they lead us? These are the questions of our time.

Grey Champions

By: Strauss & Howe

One afternoon in April 1689, as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to strip them of their liberties, the King’s hand-picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston. His purpose was to crush any thought of colonial self-rule. To everyone present, the future looked grim.

Just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there appeared on the streets “the figure of an ancient man” with “the eye, the face, the attitude of command.” His manner “combining the leader and the saint,” the old man planted himself directly in the path of the approaching British soldiers and demanded that they stop. “The solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.” Inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.

“Who was this Gray Champion?” Nathaniel Hawthorne asked near the end of this story in his Twice-Told Tales. No one knew, except that he had once been among the fire-hearted young Puritans who had first settled New England more than a half century earlier. Later that evening, just before the old priest-warrior disappeared, the townspeople saw him embracing the 85-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a kindred spirit and one of the few original Puritans still alive. Would the Gray Champion ever return? “I have heard,” added Hawthorne, “that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again.”

Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again—the length of another long human life, in fact. “When eighty years had passed,” wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared. The occasion was the revolutionary summer of 1775—when America’s elders once again appealed to God, summoned the young to battle, and dared the hated enemy to fire. “When our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued, “all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds.” This “old warrior”—this graying peer of Sam Adams or Ben Franklin or Samuel Langdon (the Harvard president who preached to the Bunker Hill troops)—belonged to the Awakening Generation, whose youth had provided the spiritual taproot of the republic secured in their old age.

Hawthorne wrote this stirring legend in 1837, as a young man of 33. The Bunker Hill “fathers” belonged to his parents’ generation, by then well into old age. The nation had new arguments (over slavery) and new enemies (Mexico), but no one expected the old people of that era—the worldly likes of John Marshall and John Jacob Astor—to be play the role of Gray Champion.

“Long, long may it be ere he comes again!” Hawthorne prophesied. “His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invaders’ step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come….” Although Hawthorne did not say when this would be, perhaps he should have been able to tell.

Had the young author counted eight or nine decades forward from Bunker Hill, or had he envisioned the old age of the young zealots (like Joseph Smith, Nat Turner, and William Lloyd Garrison) who had recently convulsed America’s soul, he might have foreseen that the next Gray Champion would emerge from his own Transcendental Generation. Seared young by God, Hawthorne’s peers were destined late in life to face an hour of “darkness, and adversity, and peril.” The old priest-warrior would arise yet again in John Brown, damning the unrighteous from his scaffold; in Julia Ward Howe, writing “a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel”; in William Tecumseh Sherman, scorching Georgia with “the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword”; in Robert E. Lee commanding thousands of young men to their deaths at Cemetery Ridge; and especially in Abraham Lincoln, announcing to Congress that “the fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.”

Were Hawthorne to have prophesied yet another eight decades further ahead, he might have foretold another Gray Champion whose childhood would begin just after the “fiery trial” of Hawthorne’s own old age. This generation would come of age scorching the elder-built world with its inner fire—and then, a half-saeculum later, complete its self-declared “rendezvous with destiny” as “the wise old men of World War II.” By adding FDR’s Missionary Generation to the recurrence, Hawthorne’s Tale would have been not Twice, but Four Times Told.

When ancestral generations passed through these great gates of history, they saw in the Gray Champion a type of elder very different from the bustling “senior citizens” of America’s recent past—and from the old “Uncle Sam” Revolutionary War survivors of the 1830s, when Hawthorne wrote his tale. Who were these old priest warriors? They were elder expressions of the Prophet archetype. And their arrival into old age heralded a new constellation of generations.

 

iMORONS UNITE

You can’t make this shit up. Three minutes that will crush any illusions you might have of the masses rising up and shaking off the yoke of corporate fascism. The decades of mass media propaganda and dumbing down of the people through our government run public education system has succeeded beyond Edward Bernays’ wildest dreams. I give you the next head of the Department of Commerce:

TOWER OF BABEL: fact or fiction?

PROLOGUE

Along with The Arky Arky and the Great Flood, the Tower of Babel is one of the best known bible stories.

But it is famous beyond its ACTUAL content … a mere 236 words (in English). Yet, the story has come to mean much more than its actual words. For example, the idea that God is so afraid of tall brick structures that he has to create multiple languages to keep people from becoming too smart for their own good.

Most have at least a vague idea of what the story is about, or at least know the name “Babel”. But, let’s take a look at the entire brief text. I will follow-up with my usual outrageous observations.

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THE BIBLICAL TEXT — GENESIS 11:1-9
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

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BACKGROUND

The Babel story is a great example why a literal interpretation of many OT stories makes no sense whatsoever. A literal interpretation makes a mockery of science, tortures logic, and detracts from the author’s actual spiritual meaning (if any) he intended to impart.

Genesis is a narrative dealing with “beginnings,” as its title indicates. It records the beginning of the universe, plant life, animal life, and even mankind. Hence, one is tempted to apply a literal interpretation that the primary lesson of the Babel passage is the record of how human beings began to speak different languages. This is incorrect, as you will soon see.

That being said, “Babel” may very well be a story of beginnings. The city “Babel,” is the same exact term used of “Babylon” elsewhere in the Bible. Indeed, the Tower was built in Mesopotamia, not Israel. So, more than just a possible explanation for the confusion of languages, it may also function as the etymology of “Babylon” …. the very same Babylonian empire that would wreak tremendous havoc on Israel in sixth century B.C.E. … and the very same Babylon called a “Whore” in Revelation, representing all that is evil, and ultimately destroyed.

Before I get into specifics, it is worth mentioning the origin of the word “Babel”. Strong’s Concordance says the word means “confusion”. That may be true regarding the meaning, but that’s not its etymology. In Hebrew “el” is a name for God … any God, actually. In Ezekiel — “I am el (God), in the seat of elōhîm (Gods). The Hebrews called God El-shaddai (God almighty), ImmanuEL (God with us), and dozens of other “el-” names. The Miriam Webster dictionary gives the following etymology — “Middle English, from Hebrew Bābhel, from Akkadian bāb-ilu, gate”. So, what is Babel? Literally, the Gate of God. So, is it the city that’s called Babel because that’s where God “came down” … as the text says? Or, was the actual tower the people were constructing the “gate of God” … their attempt to “reach to heaven”, or more likely, their attempt to provide a means for God to come down? The text is not clear. So, we’ll leave as interesting speculation.

THE MYTH OF A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”

A literal interpretation presents problems right from the get go. That’s because there has NEVER been One Universal Language spoken by all humanity. However, I don’t wish to debate philology. A fine overview of the origin of languages is here; — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language

Rather, I am much more interested in the status of human language AT THE TIME referred to by the text. Scholars diverge wildly regarding the possible date the Tower of Babel could have been built – anywhere from 3500BC – 2500BC. So, let’s take the earliest possible date (3500BC) and briefly examine the archaeological evidence.

I need only one example. Spirit Cave in Thailand is a stratified site showing human occupation from BEFORE 5000 B.C. We do not know what language they were speaking in what is now Thailand …. but we can be darn sure it was not Sumerian, or Hebrew. Also, an archaeological dig in Pakistan revealed trident-shaped writing on fragments of pottery dating even further back at 5,500 years BC. Pretty sure they weren’t speaking Sumerian or Hebrew either. There, I gave you two examples.

The fact of the matter is the writer of Genesis 11 was oblivious to the existence of the Far East, Australia, the Americas, and pretty much the rest of the world beyond a few hundred miles of his locale. . Had he been aware of these lands, the peoples, and their cultures … which existed AT THE SAME TIME as when The Tower was built …. then he would have had a much better understanding regarding the history of language, and he would NEVER have said “.. the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech”.

Furthermore … and quite significantly … the previous chapter in Genesis, Gen: 10, seems to completely contradict the Babel story. Gen 10 is known as the “Table of Nations”. It lists all the nations that derived from Noah’s sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth) after the flood; Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, dozens of other “ites” and even including Egypt and …. Babylon. No one in their right mind would suggest that ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon spoke the same language. We have written texts from both areas to prove otherwise. So,now we have at least two languages. Of much, much greater significance is the fact that the Bible itself states that once dispersed …. these people spoke “after their tongues”! Let’s be clear about this; the Bible states people spoke in unique tongues BEFORE the construction of the Tower.

Either the author of Chapter 11 was being redundant at best (an unlikely repetition in Chapter 11 of what was just reviewed in Chapter 10), or much more likely, he didn’t know that God ALREADY dispersed the nations … each speaking after their own tongues. That’s quite a conundrum for literalists.

GOD GETS ALL PARANOID, ONCE AGAIN

“ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower … Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down,”

1)- God says, “let US go down”. Who is this “us”?? Some folks say it is a figure of speech; such as when a British Royal Queen refers to herself as “we”. Unfortunately, there was no British royalty back then … and the royalty that did exist simply didn’t talk that way. But most Christians say God was talking to Jesus in his pre-incarnate form .. cuz Jeebus existed before he was born. I don’t know how to debate time-travel fantasies, so I won’t. The more logical explanation is that the ancient Jews, before they developed monotheism, believed in multiple Gods. Even Abraham’s father worshipped multiple Gods, and almost certainly Abraham was raised by his own father to do likewise (until he didn’t). Many years later, perhaps decades, Rachel was caught hiding the “household idols” inside her camel’s saddle. Then after the Jews escaped Egpyt, one of their first acts was to construct and worship a Golden Calf. However Christians want to interpret this. The fact of the matter is that early Judaism adopted very many of the Gods they left behind, they believed in multiple Gods, amd monotheism actually took centuries to fully develop.

2)- Why does an omniscient, omnipotent God need to “come down” to see anything?? And, where exactly is he coming down from? Does he walk, or take a bus? Theologians call this anthropomorphism; “the attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being, such as a God.”. These attributions must be made because no one has ever seen this OT God. Moses came closest, and even then, he only saw God’s “backside” … literally, “ass”. Who said there’s no humor in the Bible? “Anthropomorphism” is just a way of saying; “We make our Gods in MAN’S image.” Have you ever noticed that Western Gods behave just like humans? Especially the Greek and Roman Gods with all their fornication and backstabbing and jealousy and murder. And the OT God who laughs, cries, repents, has massive bouts of anger so much so that he has attempted to wipe out the human race, is often driven to jealous rage, and suffers from severe bouts of paranoid insecurity. We “anthropomorphize” deities because the more the Gods become like men, the easier it is for men to believe in the Gods.

3) Regarding paranoia in the Tower of Babel story —- why would an omnipotent God be so damn afraid of humans [supposedly] speaking one language? Why is he so afraid of humans building a structure that is, at best, about 300 feet high? Why didn’t he strike dead the builders of One World Trade Center who just completed a 1,776 foot skyscraper? Why is God afraid of technological progress? Does God REALLY believe that by having one language that “NOTHING” will be “impossible” for mankind? The implication being that puny finite mankind can (will) overthrow an all-powerful eternal God …. unless their language be confounded. Isn’t this idea just beyond silly, and indicative of massive paranoia?

And this isn’t the first time God exhibited his paranoia. He freaked out when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit …. fearing that mankind is “now like us”. (There’s that ‘us’ again.) Really?? Humans are now like God because they ate some fruit? Shortly thereafter God freaked out again … afraid that Adam and Eve might eat from a tree that would give them eternal life, so he had an angel with a flaming sword drive them out of the Garden to prevent that. Another time God was so freaked out over man’s wickedness that he sent a Great Flood to wipe out all but eight people from the face of the earth …. you know, because this all-powerful God was totally powerless to influence humanity. There are dozens more stories in the OT where God freaks out, and when God freaks out, humans die. A strange and paranoid God.

HOW DID GOD PULL THIS OFF?

Almost always in the reading of God’s miracles, they are almost always simply accepted at face value. The reasoning being that God is All-Powerful, and therefore He can do anything He wants. So, when the Bible states that the planet Earth stopped spinning, or the sun stood still, (so that Joshua could kill more Amorites), well, not one in a hundred Christian readers stops to ask themselves “how in the hell is that even possible without the earth exploding into space in a million fragments?” “More miracles” is the only possible response. But that answers absolutely nothing. Such cop-out explanations are akin to the Hindu idea that the elephant holds up the earth. Someone asks, “What holds up the elephant?” Answer: Another elephant. And so on, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

So, exactly how did God pull this off? Did folks suddenly and immediately in the blink of an eye start speaking, for example, German? Were they suddenly able to pronounce “umlauts” and that crazy “ch” sound? Did they suddenly and immediately understand the nuances of the German language and realize that one can now end a sentence with a verb? Did they suddenly wear Lederhosen? Language is in the brain, of course, so did God have to “rewire” each and every person’s brain, from 5 year olds to 100 year olds? Key question; did they forget their original language … or were they bilingual, in which case, of course, the people would all STILL have a common language! Lol

WAS CONFOUNDING LANGUAGE A GOOD IDEA?

It doesn’t seem that confounding human language was all that brilliant. SAME language / culture unites … MULTICULTURALISM divides. It is significant to note that up to this point in biblical history, man had not fought against his fellow man other than in conflicts between individuals. There had been no mention of wars, no racial strife, no religious bigotry, no patriotic blood baths. Man had no reason to gang up and attack other groups of men. At that time, man was not at war with his fellow man and all men communicated freely in one tongue. It was this free communication which God knew he must put an end to if he planned on keeping men enslaved. Brilliant!

IS GOD BIPOLAR?

I ask this because thousands of years later in the New Testament book of Acts (2:1-11), God has a totally different agenda. This agenda is the antithesis of Babel … ONE language. This is the narrative. Believers were all in one place and of one accord (just like in Babel). The story even uses the word “confounded”, but for a different reason. This time after having received the Holy Spirit, the apostles preach … and men of diverse languages hear the sermon IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGES. Back in Babel the plan was to separate people, and now in Acts we’re seeing the exact opposite; a great re-integration. Bad one time. Good the next time. I wish God would make up His mind.

It seems that God’s primary reason for “coming down” was not necessarily the Tower structure itself – that was merely the means to an end — but because the people of Babel wanted to “make a name for ourselves”. But, in the very next chapter it is God himself who makes Abraham’s name great. King David spends a good portion of his life making a name for himself (2 Sam 8:13) without any negative repercussions or divine reprisals. It can be really hard to figure out what God really believes / wants.

WHAT LESSON CAN WE LEARN FROM THE TOWER OF BABEL?

Are we really supposed to believe that the Builders of the tower were motivated by building a structure that could reach heaven? How stupid would that be? They built the thing on “the PLAINS of Shinar”. A FLAT plain. There were MOUNTAINS nearby which would have given them a few thousand feet head start. Lol Are we to believe that they thought they could build a structure higher than a mountain? If they really wanted to reach the heavens, wouldn’t they have built the tower on the nearest high mountain? Yes. So, there must have been a different motivation … one we will never know. However, I can speculate on what the writer of the Babel story intended.

We can all certainly agree that the end result in the Tower story is one of division (one of God’s specialties). Let’s take a very brief look at one other major example in how God divides. OK. So, God chooses one race to his people … creating Judaism in the process. God later sends a Messiah to create a second division of his people …. creating Christianity in the process. God then chooses another guy, Mohammed, to create a third division of his people …. creating Islam in the process. And don’t tell me it wasn’t God who did all this. You should know that for ALL three of these divisions, God used the angel Gabriel as the messenger. Of course, these divisions have resulted in the longest and bloodiest conflicts in human history … which continue to this very day.

So, what are we to make of all this?

The 16th century philosopher, Machiavelli, may be able to help understand what is going on. Machiavelli described how a third party could manipulate two other parties … and maintain control over them both. It works like this;

—– 1) The Ruler creates a division amongst the people.

—– 2) The Ruler does this by creating conditions which accentuate the differences between groups. This causes conflict, and so the groups fight amongst themselves rather than against the ruler.

—– 3) The Ruler hides that HE is the cause of the conflicts, going so far as to feign innocence.

—– 4) The Ruler then offers support to ALL parties involved, thus maintaining their loyalty and faith in him.

—– 5) The Ruler is now viewed as The Beneficial One – Machiavelli uses the term “concerned parent” — no matter how bad and evil The Ruler might be in reality. After all, ONLY The Ruler can help bring everyone back together. There is a steep cost, of course. Many will suffer. Few will benefit. But, no one will ever blame The Ruler … which is just the way he likes it.

Now, am I saying that God is some type of Machiavellian monster? No. But, I am saying that that’s how the writers of Scripture often portray Him. Some may not want to hear this, but I am 100% convinced that the various authors of Scripture had no clue whatsoever that they were writing Scripture. There was no voice from heaven thundering “Hezekiah! Grab a pen. Let’s write some Scripture!”. They had no clue that the words they penned would take hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years to be considered “The Word of God” … and even then, only by a fatally flawed procedure of humans voting. The Ancient Sages had even less of a clue as to how the world works, human psychology and all that, but that didn’t stop them from trying to explain it.

So they wrote stuff, lots of stuff … some of it eventually became God’s Word … based on their observations and very limited knowledge. I imagine some smart (at the time) guy trying to explain to the people how multiple languages came into being, so he fabricates a story that at one time all humanity spoke just one language (a blatant misconception). No one apparently knew better, so people believed it. They believed it for so long, that even when the truth of the matter was made know … people STILL believed it. That, my friends, is the power of propaganda, believing the temporary lie until it becomes permanent truth. So, people have a choice to make. For me, the Tower of Babel story is an interesting piece of ancient literature. Nothing more.

EIGHT HUNDRED MILLION F@#KING DOLLARS IN 24 HOURS

I’m flabbergasted on a daily basis by the idiocy that goes on in this country. We have the lowest percentage of people working since 1978. We have 47 million people, or 20% of all households, on food stamps. The real median household income is lower than it was in 1998. Gas prices are near all-time highs. The average family has virtually no retirement or current savings. Despite these facts, millions of broke Americans lined up to buy a freaking video game to the tune of $800 million in the first 24 hours on the market. They just whipped out the credit card and went $60 further into debt. I’m sure some people enjoy video games. Personally, I have never played a video game in my entire life. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on games for my kids, but never played one of them. Of course, I’ve never sent a text message in my life either, so I may not be the ideal judge of technology.

I see this phenomenon as part of the bigger picture of a world ruled by propaganda, distraction, chosen servitude and willful ignorance. The corporate fascist ruling class know they must keep the masses distracted from the true reality of their situation. Video games, sporting events, 24 hour faux news entertainment, reality TV, porn, the stock market, religion, evil dictators, iGadgets, fashion magazines, and most of the internet are just opium for the masses.  

Our Controllers have succeeded in implementing every dystopian idea dreamed up by Aldous Huxley and detailed in his classic 1932 novel – Brave New World. Huxley’s fears have been realized to a greater extent than he could have imagined:

“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account  man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were “solemn and rare,” there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater  was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment – from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.

In “Brave New World” non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly “not of this world.” Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx’s  phrase “the opium of the people” and so a threat to freedom.

Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.” 
―    Aldous Huxley,    Brave New World Revisited

The ignorant masses that make up the majority in this country have learned to love their servitude. We threw in the towel on vigilance and love of liberty decades ago. While millions sit in front of their boob tubes killing whores and stealing cars with their joy stick in their fantasy worlds, our Controllers are smiling as they manipulate, obfuscate, and increase their wealth, power and control. Welcome to Brave New World USA.

 

‘Grand Theft Auto’ Sets $800 Million, One-Day Record

Surpassed Record Set by ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II’ Last November

 

WHICH DRUG COMPANY KILLED THE 12 PEOPLE AT THE D.C. NAVY YARD?

The corporate mainstream media has no interest in the truth. They are corporations who care about the bottom line. Aaron Alexis was taking drugs created by one of the massive drug conglomerates for his mental disorder. The dude in Aurora was on drugs created by one of the humungous drug companies. The guy in Tucson was taking drugs invented by one of these multi-billion dollar institutions. The teenagers at Columbine were on psychiatric drugs. The fact is that these drugs produce the violent crazed outbursts of these killers. Supposedly mild dosages of sleep drugs like Ambien can scramble your mental faculties. These psychotropic drugs are 100 times more powerful. The drug  companies and their paid off doctor cronies are prescribing these drugs to millions of Americans and the true impact is being covered up by the corporate media and the medical industrial complex. The corporate mass media will gladly sacrifice truth and journalistic integrity in order to keep the billions in advertising dollars from these scumbag drug cartels.

A real journalist would be able to find out which drug company is responsible for the 12 deaths this week and shout it from the mountaintop. Don’t count on CNN, MSNBC, Fox or any of the faux journalists in the MSM to kill their advertising golden goose. This is just free market capitalism at its best.

Have you seen any apologies from the MSM about their declaration that Alexis used an AR-15? Didn’t think so.

Media Buries Psychiatric Drug Connection to Navy Shooter

Networks don’t want to risk losing $2.4 billion in ad revenue from pharmaceutical giants

Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com

September 18, 2013

Despite every indication that Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was on SSRI drugs that have been linked to dozens of previous mass shootings, the mainstream media has once again avoided all discussion of the issue, preferring instead to blame the tragedy on a non-existent AR-15 that the gunman didn’t even use.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

We now know that Alexis “had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems.”

As Mike Adams points out, “This is proof that Aaron Alexis was on psychiatric drugs, because that’s the only treatment currently being offered by the Veterans Administration for mental problems. Alexis’ family members also confirmed to the press that he was being “treated” for his mental health problems. Across the medical industry, “treatment” is the code word for psychiatric drugging.”

Alexis also suffered from PTSD, blackouts and anger issues – all of which are treated with SSRI drugs. The most common form of treatment for PTSD is Paroxetine, which is listed as the number 3 top violence-causing drug by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP).

The Navy Yard shooter was clearly on some form of psychiatric drug, but the media has shown no interest in discovering its identity.

Despite it being reported that prescription drugs were found in the apartment of ‘Batman’ shooter James Holmes days after the Aurora massacre, it took nine months to find out exactly what those drugs were. Like Columbine killer Eric Harris, Holmes had been taking Zoloft, another SSRI drug linked with violent outbursts.

The length of time it took to find out that Holmes was on Zoloft was partly because the media habitually shows zero interest in pursuing the link between anti-depressants and violence.

As the website SSRI Stories profusely documents, there are literally hundreds of examples of mass shootings, murders and other violent episodes that have been committed by individuals on psychiatric drugs over the past three decades. The number of cases is staggering.

Why is the corporate media so disinterested in pursuing this clear connection?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the pharmaceutical giants who produce drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil spend around $2.4 billion dollars a year on direct-to-consumer television advertising every year. By running negative stories about prescription drugs, networks risk losing tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue.

While failing to ask questions about what SSRI drugs Aaron Alexis was taking prior to his rampage, the media instead blamed the shooting on assault rifles, even after it had been confirmed that no AR-15 was used by Alexis during the massacre.

FBI assistant director Victoria Parlave stated at a press conference on Tuesday that authorities, “do not have any information at this time that [Alexis] had an AR-15 in his possession.”

Despite there being no evidence that an AR-15 was used, the New York Daily News ran a front page headline yesterday morning entitled, “Same Gun Different Slay,” next to a picture of an assault rifle.

Hours after the FBI stated that no AR-15 had been used, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, who previously blamed the Boston bombings on Alex Jones, continued to use an animated graphic depicting Alexis carrying an assault rifle during the massacre.

Anti-second amendment crusader Piers Morgan also erroneously blamed the shooting on “a man with a legally purchased AR-15, who just committed the same kind of atrocity as we saw at Sandy Hook, and Aurora,” during his CNN show on Monday.

CNN’s live news coverage also reported that Alexis had “recently purchased (an) AR-15 shotgun,” when in fact that purchase had been denied.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post also falsely reported that an AR-15 had been found on Alexis after the massacre.

D.C. gun grabbers Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin also regurgitated the false claim that Alexis used an AR-15 during the rampage.

The U.S. press has once again behaved like state media in the aftermath of the Navy Yard shooting by pursuing the assault rifle angle – despite the fact that it was patently false – in order to bolster the White House’s gun control agenda.

In doing so, they have concurrently buried an integral aspect of mass shootings that needs to be highlighted as part of a national conversation – the clear connection between violent outbursts and SSRI drugs.

Stucky Tells The State Of Michigan To Stick It Where The Sun Don’t Shine

Dear ACT Team,

At 8:35 AM this morning my son got on a train bound for Newark, NJ.

You Gestapo Goons tried to keep that from happening, but couldn’t. Then you Gestapo Goons decided that you’d pump him up with your Poison Shots a week earlier than scheduled … you thought he was leaving next week ….. haha, fooled ya!!

Then you Statist, Control-Freak, assholes decided to call me and give me all kinds of instructions; giving me the contact-names and clinic names where you want me to take my son and force him against his will to take your Poison Shots. And I mumbled, “Yeah, sure.” … cuz I just don’t feel like arguing with brainwashed retarded Gestapo Goons.

But, the joke is on you, you assholes. Now that he’ll be in my care for the next few months … WE’LL DO IT MY WAY!! I won’t be taking him to no fucking clinic. And don’t bother calling … I won’t be accepting, or returning, your calls … except I might refer you to this post. Here’s my final word to you; KISS MY LILLY WHITE ASS!!!!!!

Cordially,
You know who

The Only Legal Way to Escape US Taxes Besides Death and Renunciation

The Only Legal Way to Escape US Taxes Besides Death and Renunciation

By Nick Giambruno, Editor, International Man

When I hear about strategies that purport to legally allow US citizens to avoid having to pay income taxes, the first thing that usually comes to mind is that it is some sort of dodgy cockamamie scheme.

This is because the US government is no slouch when it comes to shaking down its citizens for every penny it can get away with. The mind-boggling spending on welfare and warfare policies necessitates this. It would be dangerously foolish in the extreme to think you could slip one past them.

There really was no sure way to legally escape the suffocating grip of US taxes besides death and renouncing your US citizenship… until recently.

Every other country in the world (besides the US and Eritrea) practices a system of residence-based taxation. This means that citizens are not liable for paying income taxes to their home country if they become a legal resident of another country and earn their income there.

Take, for example, an American expat and a Canadian expat who both live and earn income in Singapore. The Canadian would only be responsible for paying the much lower Singapore income taxes, while the American would be responsible for paying Singapore income taxes AND American income taxes (though the IRS does allow for around $100k of foreign earned income to be excluded from income taxes if certain conditions are met).

This is because the US taxes its citizens by virtue of their citizenship (citizenship-based taxation), regardless of where they live and earn their money. Even leaving the US permanently does not absolve you from paying US income taxes. Though Eritrea also practices citizenship-based taxation, it is an impoverished African country and has no ability to effectively enforce it. That’s the key difference. The US government can effectively enforce its citizenship-based taxation policies thanks to its massive economic, political, and military weight and the fact that it does not recognize any limit to its jurisdiction (consider FATCA and Edward Snowden).

American expats are therefore in the uniquely unfavorable position of having arguably the worst tax policies and a government that can effectively enforce them. For many, it is a tight and suffocating tax leash. It is no wonder, then, that a record number of Americans gave up their citizenship last quarter to escape these onerous requirements. (You can find more about citizenship-based taxation versus residence-based taxation in this article.)

There is, however, another way besides death and renunciation to legally escape US income taxes, thanks to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory (commonwealth) of the US, and this allows it to have a special tax arrangement. Namely, legal residents of Puerto Rico who earn their income in Puerto Rico do not pay US federal income taxes (though they still have to file a federal tax return).

All Puerto Ricans are already US citizens, and since it is a commonwealth of the US, Americans are generally free to stay on the island without restriction and do not even need a passport to travel there.

In order to obtain legal residency status in Puerto Rico and the associated tax benefits, one would have to be physically present on the island for at least 183 days a year.

While US citizens who become legal Puerto Rican residents do not have to pay US federal income taxes on income earned on the island, they still have to pay local Puerto Rican taxes. This only amounts to 4% in certain cases, a pittance in comparison to combined US federal, state, and sometimes city income taxes.

This low 4% rate only applies if the services are performed in Puerto Rico for clients outside of Puerto Rico—otherwise a local income tax of as much as 33% is applicable. For example, an investment manager based in Puerto Rico who performs services for US-based clients would be eligible for the lower income tax rate. Consult a tax expert to discuss individual cases and circumstances.

In addition, Puerto Rico recently slashed its taxes on dividends and interest to ZERO, and capital gains taxes to as low as zero (maximum of 10%).This is part of a recent program over the past year or so in which Puerto Rico has been promoting itself as a tax-friendly jurisdiction open to Americans, in order to compete with its better-known Caribbean neighbors like the Cayman Islands.

Taken together, Puerto Rico is an attractive destination for American companies and individuals who have portable incomes, such as software developers, writers, Internet businesses, and especially those dealing with investments, like hedge funds, in which the majority of the earnings are derived from investment income like dividends, interest, or capital gains.

Spending half the year in Puerto Rico, with its beautiful white sand beaches, Caribbean climate, and close proximity to the US is not a bad proposition.

In short, thanks to a system of citizenship-based taxation, becoming a legal resident of Puerto Rico is the only way for Americans to keep their US citizenship and legally avoid US federal income taxes.

There have been at least 40 Americans who have taken advantage of this special arrangement with Puerto Rico and moved there during the past year. Earlier this year billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson was said to have been exploring this option. Check out the short clip below from Bloomberg about an American who has moved to Puerto Rico for exactly these reasons.

Of course, the US government could always pressure Puerto Rico to change its policies, but people in the know view that as unlikely.

For now, Puerto Rico and its special tax situation definitely deserve consideration for Americans.

Puerto Rico may be the best internationalization option for Americans at present, but its conditions may be unworkable for many. Fortunately, many other options exist for internationalizing at least part of your wealth—and your life, should you want to leave your home country and live elsewhere. And honestly, with the global economy in the state it’s in, just about everyone would benefit from internationalizing… it isn’t just for Americans.

But how to get started? What are the best ways to move wealth offshore, and what are the best destinations for it? Should you internationalize in the same countries that you move your wealth to? All these questions, and many more, can be answered in one convenient, trustworthy resource.

This resource has its roots deeply intertwined with the original “International Man”—legendary contrarian and speculator Doug Casey himself. So you can be confident that every detail has been thoroughly vetted, to not just maintain your wealth and lifestyle… but in many cases, to improve them. Get all the details and get started on your path to internationalization right now.

TAPER MY FAT A$$

I’ve been saying for weeks that Bernanke needed a Syrian War to give him an excuse to not taper. The American people and Vlad Putin put the kabosh on that plan. Soon to retire Ben was left with no choice but to just prove he is a tool for Wall Street and the corporate interests by announcing he has no plans to taper. His goal is to get out of Washington DC in January before the entire thing implodes. He’ll let Yellen or some other idiot take the fall. Ben is a ball-less wonder.

His bosses on Wall Street have begun their ticker tape parade by setting their HFT supercomputers to buy. Only thoughtful people are stepping back to question this surprise move. How bad is the true situation that Bennie can’t even taper by $5 billion per month? The suppression of gold and silver prices by Wall Street and Bennie has been a high priority because rising precious metals prices reveals how bad things are. We now know that Bennie thinks the situation is so dire, he is even willing to let gold and silver go wild. Bennie will inflate and debase until the cows come home.

Gold is up $50 from its lows on the day, or 3.9%

Silver is up 5.8% from its low on the day.

All you plebs who need to fill up your gas tank on a weekly basis will be thrilled to know oil jumped by 2.6% to over $108 a barrel.

Do you think Bennie works for you or Wall Street?

Party on Garth!!!

 

 

FOMC Shocker: No Taper

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/18/2013 14:01 -0400

It seems the Fed is so scared about something (despite every long-only asset manager telling us day after day that the economy is recovering and the US doesn’t need crisis support… oh and can withstand higher rates) that they have gone against consensus and decided that Tapering now is premature:
  • *FED REFRAINS FROM QE TAPER, KEEPS MONTHLY BUYING AT $85 BLN
  • *FED: RISE IN MORTGAGE RATES, FISCAL POLICY RESTRAIN GROWTH
  • *FED: `TIGHTENING OF FINANCIAL CONDITIONS’ COULD SLOW GROWTH
  • *MOST FED OFFICIALS SEE FIRST INTEREST-RATE RISE IN 2015

Pre-FOMC: S&P Futs 1696, VIX , 10Y 2.865%, MTG Spread 72.5bps, USD 81.00, WTI $107.00, Gold $1310

We await Cramer and Liesman to explain what to do next…

Consensus was for a $6bn taper in TSYs and $3bn taper in MBS

What the Washington Navy Yard Shooting Really Means…

What the Washington Navy Yard Shooting Really Means…

By Paul Rosenberg, FreemansPerspective.com

Freeman's Perspective

There was a shooting earlier this week in DC. The details are still sketchy as I write this, but it appears that a deranged man decided to kill other people for some reason. In response, the usual talking heads will be debating whether this is actual TerrorTM or merely something like it. But the T-word will be spoken in the same grave way we speak of cancer – a thing to be dreaded above all else.

Certainly this shooting was a horrible, tragic thing – especially for the families involved. But that said, any talk about an “age of terror” is utter crap.

Terror is NOT worse now than it was before 9/11 – it’s just that we’ve been bombarded with fear for more than a decade, creating a culture-wide residue that poisons every mind it touches. In actual fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist. Does that mean that we should all have a collective panic attack and beg for anti-police police?

Now here’s the truth they don’t want you to know: You are taught to fear because fear makes you easy to manipulate. If someone is making you afraid, they’re also making you into an easy mark – a sucker.

Think of how many things people have accepted from governments just because they were afraid. Things like complete online surveillance, crotch searches at airports, random searches on the highways, and so on. Do you think those would have been accepted in 1920? Of course they wouldn’t, because people hadn’t been sufficiently frightened at that time.

The Facts About Terrorism

The fact is, there has been terror in every age of human history. Our time is not unusual at all. A small but consistent percentage of people are always crazy enough to kill strangers and blow things up.

Let me give you some proof from a single year:

  • March 6: A bomb being assembled by terrorists explodes, killing 3.
  • April 8: 47 children are killed by (peacetime) bombs from a neighboring country.
  • May 4: Soldiers kill four American college students.
  • May 8: A huge mob of construction workers in New York attacks protestors.
  • May 14: Police fire on a crowd at a college, killing 2 and injuring 12.
  • June 9: A bomb explodes at New York police headquarters.
  • July 12: Two canisters of tear gas are thrown into the British House of Commons.
  • August 7: Terrorists take a judge hostage in California, then kill him.
  • September 1: An assassination attempt on the King of Jordan.
  • September 6: Terrorists hijack four airplanes on flights to New York.
  • October 5: Terrorists kidnap a British diplomat.
  • October 10: Terrorists kidnap a Canadian Minister. He is found dead a week later.
  • November 25: Terrorists seize the headquarters of Japan’s Defense Forces.
  • November 27: An assassination attempt on the Pope.
  • December 3: A major government caves and releases 5 terrorists.
  • December 4: Spain declares martial law.
  • December 7: A Swiss ambassador is kidnapped.
  • December 13: Martial law is declared in Poland.

Can You Guess The Year?

Think it was in some terrible period of history? Maybe one of the worst years during World War Two?

It was 1970.

But you don’t have any horrible, scary feelings about 1970, do you? That’s because you were never taught to have them – unlike the endless fear that has been promoted to you in recent years.

You may not remember 1970, but I do, and I’ll tell you that people weren’t peeing themselves over this stuff. They thought these events were horrible, of course, but they also knew that such things had always happened, and would continue to happen.

Acts of Terrorism in the US

While 9/11 resulted in the single highest loss of life due to terrorism, such events aren’t isolated incidents. We’ve always had them:

  • 1910: A bomb goes off at the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21.
  • 1917: A race riot in East St. Louis kills between 40 and 200.
  • 1919: A race riot in Chicago kills dozens and injures hundreds.
  • 1920: A bomb explodes on Wall Street, killing 38 and injuring 143.
  • 1927: A deranged man blows up a school in Michigan, killing 44 and injuring 58.
  • 1943: A race riot in Detroit kills 34 and injures 433.
  • 1968: Race riots erupt in at least 125 US cities.
  • 1972: Terrorists detonate a bomb inside the Pentagon.
  • 1988: A terrorist poisons bottles of Tylenol in Chicago. 7 people die.

Get the picture? And I can give you examples of terror back to a few thousand years BC, from every corner of the world.

Do you really think that our new Nazi-style police state will stop this? (The Nazis couldn’t even stop assassination attempts on Hitler.)

These events are tragic, of course, but the chorus of fear that accompanies them it is all about manipulation: to keep us quiet and well behaved while we are bled of our money and our freedoms.

And boy, are they good at it.

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

David Stockman On 2008: “Hank Paulson’s Folly: AIG Was Safe Enough to Fail” Part 1

Authored by David Stockman, author of “The Great Deformation”,

A decisive tipping point in the evolution of American capitalism and democracy—the triumph of crony capitalism—took place on October 3, 2008. That was the day of the forced march approval on Capitol Hill of the $700 billion TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bill to bail out Wall Street. This spasm of financial market intervention, including multi-trillion-dollar support lines provided to the big banks and financial companies by the Federal Reserve, was but the latest brick in the foundation of a fundamentally anti-capitalist régime known as “Too Big to Fail” (TBTF). It had been under construction for many decades, but now there was no turning back. The Wall Street bailouts of 2008 shattered what little remained of the old-time fiscal rules.

There was no longer any pretense that the free market should determine winners and losers and that tapping the public treasury requires proof of compelling societal benefit. Not when AAA-rated General Electric had been given $30 billion in taxpayer loans and guarantees to avoid taking modest losses on toxic assets it had foolishly funded with overnight borrowings that suddenly couldn’t be rolled over.

Even more improbably, Goldman Sachs had been handed $10 billion to save itself from alleged extinction. Yet it then swiveled on a dime and generated a $29 billion financial surplus—$16 billion in salary and bonuses on top of $13 billion in net income—for the year that began just three months later.

Even if Goldman didn’t really need the money, as it later claimed, a round trip from purported rags to evident riches in fifteen months stretched the bounds of credulity. It was reminiscent of actor Gary Cooper’s immortal 1950s expression of suspicion about Communism. “From what I have heard about it,” he told a congressional committee, “it isn’t on the level.”

Nor was Washington’s panicked bailout of Wall Street on the level; it was both unnecessary and targeted at the wrong problem. The so-called financial meltdown was not the real crisis; it was only the tip of the iceberg, the leading edge of a more fundamental economic malady. In truth, the US economy was heading for the wringer because a multi-decade spree of unsustainable borrowing, speculation, and financialization of the national economy was coming to an abrupt end.

In the years after 1980, America had undergone the equivalent of a national leveraged buyout (LBO). It was now saddled with $30 trillion more in combined public and private debt than would have been the case under the time-tested canons of financial discipline and prudence which prevailed during the nation’s long economic ascent. This massive debt burden had fueled a three-decade prosperity party by mortgaging the nation’s future. Now the bill was coming due and our national simulacrum of prosperity was over.

This rendezvous with the limits of “peak debt,” however, did not mean that the Main Street economy was in danger of collapse into an instant depression. That was the specious claim of the bailsters. What did threaten was a deeper and more enduring adversity. The demise of this thirty-year debt super cycle actually meant that it was payback time. Instead of swiping growth from the future, the American economy would now face a long twilight of debt deflation and struggle to restore household, corporate, and public sector solvency.

This abrupt turn in the road should not have been surprising. America’s fantastic collective binging on debt, public and private, had no historical precedent. During the century prior to 1980, for example, total public and private debt on US balance sheets rarely exceeded 1.6 times GDP. When the national borrowing spree reached its apogee in 2007, however, the $4 trillion of new debt issued by households, business, banks, and governments amounted to 6 times that year’s $700 billion gain in GDP. Plain and simple, what was being recorded as GDP growth was little more than faux prosperity borrowed from the future.

In fact, by the time of the financial crisis total US debt outstanding was $52 trillion and represented 3.6 times national income of $14 trillion. Accordingly, there were now two full turns of extra debt weighing on the nation’s economy. And the embedded math was forbidding: at the historic leverage ratio of 1.6 times national income, which had prevailed for most of the hundred years prior to 1980, total US public and private debt would have been only $22 trillion at the end of 2008.

So the nation’s households, businesses, and taxpayers were now lugging around the aforementioned $30 trillion in excess debt. This staggering financial burden dwarfed levels which had historically been proven to be healthy, prudent, and sustainable. TARP and all its kindred bailouts and the Fed’s ceaseless money printing could not relieve it. And Washington’s reckless use of Uncle Sam’s credit card to fund the Obama stimulus actually made it far worse by attempting to revive the false prosperity of the bubble years. The obvious question remains: Why did this plague of debt arise? Did the American people suddenly become profligate and greedy through a mysterious process of moral and social decay?

There is no evidence for the greed disease theory but plenty of reason to suspect a more foreboding cause. The real reason for the current crisis of debt and financial disorder is that public policy had veered into the ditch, permitting an unprecedented aggrandizement of the state and its central banking branch. In the process, the vital nerve center of capitalism, its money and capital markets, had been perverted and deformed. Wall Street has become a vast casino where leveraged speculation and rent seeking have displaced its vital function of price discovery and capital allocation.

The September 2008 financial crisis, therefore, was about the need to drastically deflate the Wall Street behemoths—that is, dangerous and unstable gambling houses—fostered by decades of money printing and market rigging by the Fed. Yet policy veered in the opposite direction, propping them up and thereby perpetuating their baleful effects, owing to a predicate that was dead wrong.

A handful of panic-stricken top officials, led by treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, proclaimed that the financial system had been stricken by a deadly “contagion” that had come out of nowhere and threatened a chain reaction of financial failures that would end in cataclysm. That proposition was completely false, but it gave rise to a fateful injunction—namely, that all the normal rules of free market capitalism and fiscal prudence needed to be suspended so that unprecedented and unlimited public resources could be poured into the rescue of Wall Street’s floundering behemoths...