A LITTLE REBELLION

The US Defaulted Long Ago

The fear-mongering scare stories that have been coming out of Mordor lately about the supposed horrors of the US government defaulting are not surprising. Fear is always at the heart of threats, and politics - at its very core - is based on the threat of violence to somebody. Fear, too, is used to get ordinary Americans to get angry and to maybe even show up at the voting booth. Maybe. Voting numbers have been on the decline (thank God!), mainly due to ignorance, distrust, and the realization that a thousand calls to your Congresscritter always weighs less than a little nudge from GE, Lockheed, or Raytheon.

Pay no attention this circus about the hell that will be unleashed if the largest criminal organization in the history of the world can't mortgage more of its future. Besides, the US government defaulted a loooooong time ago when it chose to enact self-destructive policies - albeit ones that provided short-term political gain. When it comes to this tornado of debt and madness, we are now reaching our final destination:

• The enactment of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 allowing the government to impose a tax on your income, thereby opening Pandora’s Box to a 60,000 page tax code and allowing politicians to sell their votes to the highest bidder.
• The signing into law of the Federal Reserve Act by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, transferring control of our currency system to Wall Street banks. The man made inflation created by the Federal Reserve has reduced the purchasing power of the USD by 97% since 1913 and has allowed politicians to promise $100 trillion of benefits to Americans, that can never be delivered.
• The Social Security Act signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, supposedly to help widows and orphans, morphed into a giant ponzi scheme used by politicians to make Americans think it was a retirement plan and the money was in a lockbox. The scam continues, but ponzi schemes always collapse.
• Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as a government agency and Freddie Mac was created in 1970 as a quasi-government agency. By promoting home ownership and subsidizing loans to people who should have never gotten loans these agencies caused hundreds of billions in mal-investment. As tools of politicians, they were used to push social agendas. The result will be in excess of $300 billion in losses to the American taxpayer.
• The Korean War set a precedent where the President did not need to seek Congress to declare war as required under the Constitution. This has allowed the President the freedom to fight undeclared wars around the world for decades, while spending trillions, with no approval from Congress.
• LBJ’s Great Society programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were sold to Americans as cost saving programs that would improve healthcare for all Americans. We now spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare and these two programs have an unfunded liability of almost $100 trillion.

• Nixon closing the gold window in 1971 removed all restraint on the Federal Reserve, banks and politicians. With a fiat currency backed by nothing but promises, it was only a matter of time before the greed and corruption of bankers and politicians overcame any self imposed fiscal responsibility. The result has been the National Debt going from $400 billion in 1971 to $14.4 trillion today, a 3,600% increase in 40 years. Meanwhile, GDP only increased 1,350% over this same time frame.
• The embrace of consumer debt by the Baby Boom generation beginning in 1980 created an atmosphere of living for today and not worrying about the future. This attitude has left 50% of all the households in the country with a net worth of $70,000 or below.
• The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 unleashed the hounds of hell upon America, as the soulless blood sucking vampires on Wall Street proceeded to rape and pillage the American economy with their financial derivatives of mass destruction and marketing of debt to the clueless masses. The housing bust and impoverishment of the middle class can be laid at the feet of these evil greedy bastards.
• Bush’s unpaid for wars of choice, his reckless tax cuts, and his foolish expansion of a bankrupt Medicare Program in the midst of two wars turbo charged the country on its path to default.
• By bailing out Wall Street on the backs of the middle class in 2008/2009, the politicians in this country showed their hand. They will protect their fellow power brokers and contributors and throw the American people under the bus. Wall Street controls Congress.
• The Keynesian schemes rolled out by Obama and his minions have just added trillions of debt while depressing the economic system and doing nothing to help the average person. The Fed created inflation has inflamed revolution through out the world and further impoverished the middle class who need to eat and fill up their cars.
• In the midst of a Depression Obama chose to create a brand new healthcare bureaucracy, add 30 million people into the government controlled system, and commit the US taxpayer to trillions of future healthcare costs.

Why Capitalism Is Worth Defending

Anthony Gregory on why the market order must be allowed to flourish:

As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we’re fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. Yet this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans’ agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: Capitalism.

Many regard it a dirty word and it is tarnished most of all by its supposed guardians. Wall Street giants fancy themselves capitalists even as they live off the taxpayer and thrive on the state’s gifts of privilege, inflation, and barriers to entry. In the military-industrial complex they champion it by name as they produce devices of murder for the state. In the Republican Party and every conservative institution they talk it up while making such vast exceptions to the principle as to swallow it whole. When many think of capitalism, they think of the corporatist status quo, leading even some who favor economic freedom to abandon the term.

But we should not abandon it. For one thing, most opponents of capitalism do not merely oppose Goldman Sachs or Halliburton or even McDonalds. Rather, they oppose free enterprise as a matter of principle. They object to employers’ liberty to hire and fire whom they want, at whatever wage is mutually arranged. They protest the right of entrepreneurs to enter the market without restriction. They disapprove businesses designing infrastructure; providing energy, food, water and other necessary commodities; and running transportation without government meddling. They lament the rich getting richer, even through purely peaceful means. They oppose the freedom to engage in short selling, insider trading, hostile takeovers, and corporate mergers without the central state’s blessing. They begrudge the worker who dissents from the labor establishment. It is exactly the anarchy of the free market they despise, not the consolidated state-big business nexus they most want to smash. For every liberal who hates monopoly capitalism for anything approaching the right reasons, there are ten who deplore the capitalism part of it more than the monopoly.

It is simply a fact that capitalism, even hampered by the state, has dragged most of the world out of the pitiful poverty that characterized all of human existence for millennia. It was industrialization that saved the common worker from the constant tedium of primitive agriculture. It was the commodification of labor that doomed slavery, serfdom, and feudalism. Capitalism is the liberator of women, the benefactor of all children who enjoy time for study and play rather than endure uninterrupted toil on the farm. Capitalism is the great mediator between tribes and nations, which first put aside their weapons and hatreds in the prospect of benefiting from mutual exchange.

Gouged At The Pump?

Writes Paul Schwennesen at The Freeman:

Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of delusional groupthink is our collective ignorance of the role of taxes in fuel prices. Americans pay an average of 49.5 cents on every gallon they purchase in federal and state taxes, environmental remediation, and local surcharges. Can you imagine your local filling station suddenly increasing (or decreasing) its price by 50 cents a gallon? It would certainly be attention-getting behavior.

Since taxes represent more than double the per-gallon share garnered by truckers and station-owners combined, you would think they would get more attention. But when it comes to complaints of “gouging,” guess who ends up in the crosshairs? It is always the local station owner who is called up on charges of “excessive” prices, or distributors who are investigated by state attorneys general. Yet for some reason taxes slide quietly under our combined radar, only coming into question when a forward-thinking activist suggests they ought to be higher, à la Europe (home to vehicles that would conveniently fit in my backseat).

Not to mention the role that government paper money has on the price of oil (and everything!). For example, a gallon of gas is under $2 in gold. The popular media may raise hell about "speculators" and "greedy oil companies," but there are many more factors at work driving up the price of commodities, and they are largely ignored.

Open Up Your Mind

 

The Legacy Of The Imperial Fiat Dollar

August 15, 1971 will always be an infamous and dark day in American history. It was then that Caesar Nixon officially ended any ties that the US dollar had to gold. A complete, 100% fiat currency that is at the heart of the welfare-warfare state and our backdoor impoverishment. As we approach the 40th anniversary of that fateful day, Ben Traynor at The Daily Reckoning blog examines the legacy of the imperial fiat dollar:

Here in 2011, it’s now been 40 years since the “temporary” suspension of Dollar convertibility. Has the Dollar been “stabilized”? Clearly not. But what’s worth noting is how much faster the Dollar’s domestic purchasing power has fallen in the last four decades – freed from gold – than it did in the 40 years before Nixon’s announcement.

Between August 1931 and August 1971, the consumer price index – as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics – went up by 170%. Since 1971, the CPI has risen 453%.

Of course, Nixon tried to spin his economic reforms – the gold window closure was accompanied by a wage and price freeze and a 10% import tariff – as necessary for “building the new prosperity”. The logic was clear. A devalued Dollar, aided by the import tax, would increase America’s international competitiveness, while wage and price controls would prevent these policies feeding through into higher inflation.

At least, that was the plan. As we know, it didn’t turn out too well on the inflation front. But higher rates of inflation aren’t the only phenomenon we’ve seen since the early 1970s. The irony is, Nixon hoped to solve another problem by closing the gold window – the US trade deficit.

“The United States has always been, and will continue to be, a forward-looking and trustworthy trading partner,” he reassured the world on that fateful August evening. Within a minute, Tricky Dicky announced the 10% tax on imports.

Nixon hoped to improve America’s trade balance. Indeed, that was one rationale behind devaluing the Dollar by de-pegging it from gold. But it didn’t work:

The United States has not run a trade surplus since 1974. It has consistently imported more goods and services than it has exported. Most countries cannot do this for long. They need the revenues from exports to pay for imports.

The US is different, because it issues the world’s only reserve currency, which is used to settle most international trade. France’s finance minister under president Charles de Gaulle, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, described this in the mid-1960s as America’s “exorbitant privilege” – the ability of the US to fund its trade gap by the creation of new Dollars, in which its imports are still denominated.

With gold convertible for Dollar bills, this “privilege” risked emptying the United States’ huge stockpile of monetary metal. But freed from that gold obligation in 1971, isn’t the privilege actually still a curse today?

The Prophet Of Liberty

Stefan Molyneaux - one of the current intellectual godfathers of the peaceful revolution - gives another great speech, firing up the crowd at PorcFest.

 

Just One More Reason To End The Drug War

At the same time that the US government subsidizes one of the most addicting substances in the world that can lead to multiple health problems like lung cancer, it locks people in cages for the possession or sale of a non-addictive substance that can cut lung cancer in half. You got to love the logic of the war on individual liberty "drugs."

'Empire Is Not A Free Market Enterprise'

Bill Bonner sums up the politics of empire very nicely:

“There’s always a trade off. It’s either politics or markets. You see that in the business world too. There are people who want control. And there are people who are trying to provide a good service or product at a profit. The politicians in a business care more about controlling things. They’ll ruin a business if you let them.

“Either you’re letting people work out their own problems…between willing buyers and sellers. Or you’re telling them what to do. Politics, especially, imperial politics is all about controlling the rest of the world.

“Trouble is, politics is expensive and unproductive. The more of it you have – either at home or abroad – the poorer you become…until you can no longer afford it. That’s the situation we’re in now. We’re already way beyond the point of no return…the point where the debt depresses growth. It’s only a matter of time before we can’t go on.

“The real question is whether we do something about it now…bringing our spending in line with our ability to spend…or whether the market forces us to do it. As Ayn Rand said, you can ignore the market. But you can’t avoid the consequences of ignoring the market. Now, we’re facing the consequences.

“And what I’m proposing is to eliminate the deficit by renouncing the empire. Of course, this would come as a huge shock to the public. They thought the Pentagon was defending them from something. They don’t even realize that we have an empire. They have no idea what it costs, what it means, or what might happen if we didn’t have one. We’ve never had that debate. Woodrow Wilson launched the nation directly on the path of empire, but there was never any discussion of it. No debate in Congress was ever held. Instead, every time we went further and further away from real national defense – such as when Wilson sent troops in WWI – it was always justified in defense terms. Even then, we were supposedly ‘making the world safe for democracy.’

Read the rest here.

What The US Can Learn From The EU, Greece

My weekly PolicyMic column.

Gold: Independent Money

Via the LRC blog, here is a great video elaborating on some of the points I attempted to make in my last PolicyMic article about the gold standard, a free market in currencies, and how government money enables the welfare-warfare state.

 

Glenn Beck Makes A Fool Of Himself Again

Glenn Beck once again proves himself to be nothing more than a shock-jock, knee-jerk Reich-winger posing as a conservative "intellectual." From the LA Times:

Instead of calling the president of the United States a racist, Beck focused on the scores of young people gunned down at a camp in Norway. Beck said the camp reminded him of Adolf Hitler's infamous Hitler Youth.

"There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing," Beck stated in the first minute of his syndicated radio show Monday.

But what was really interesting - and much more revelent to the intellectual debate over the heart and the soul of the Republic - was something the LA Times story linked to at the end of the article:

Conservative columnist Jeff Lukens created a political camp in Tampa, Fla., which aligns itself closer to "tea party" values.  One of the games described by the St. Petersburg Times would surely make presidential hopeful Ron Paul smile.

"Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the 'banker' will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value," the newspaper explained.

US Taxpayers Funding Taliban

From the Concord Monitor:

A year-long military-led investigation has concluded that U.S. taxpayer money has been indirectly funneled to the Taliban under a $2.16 billion transportation contract that the United States has funded in part to promote Afghan businesses.

The unreleased investigation provides seemingly definitive evidence that corruption puts U.S. transportation money into enemy hands, a finding consistent with previous inquiries carried out by Congress, other federal agencies and the military. Yet U.S. and Afghan efforts to address the problem have been slow and ineffective, and all eight of the trucking firms involved in the work remain on the U.S. payroll. In March, the Pentagon extended the contract for six months.

Just one more reason to root for a default or a government shutdown. Anything to get the largest looting-killing machine in the history of the world off of our backs.

The Proper Powers Of The Presidency

 

The Next Bogeyman: 'White AlQaeda'

The national-security mega-State is very, very profitable. To the "Pentagon contractors"and the entire structure of the State itself, scaring people not only keeps them docile, but keeps palms greased and power centralized. Now the Junta is looking for a new bogeyman to further tighten the screws on the police state. From BlackListedNews:

The government narrative of the “White Alqaeda” threat has been ongoing for at least 3 years now. The latest bombing in Norway is continuing the saga. In a recent development, a report from USA Today reads, “A police official tells the Associated Press that today’s terror is more like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center by Islamist fundamentalists.”

This event is feeding into a growing trend in which western governments are turning their anti-terror apparatus inward. The Department of Homeland Security recently released a video in which the depiction of terrorist activity involved white men in every threat scenario.Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently made clear that domestic terrorism is at the center of the government’s focus.

But all it takes to counter this irrational and politicized fear-mongering is a little bit of math and logic. According to a National Safety Council study:

- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane

- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

- You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack

- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack

- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack

- You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack

- You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack

- You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

- You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

Blowback In Oslo

The stenographers in the media are absolutely dumbfounded on how Oslo could be hit by two bloody attacks today. Norway is an ordinarily peaceful country, goes the narrative. But the people calling themselves the Norwegian government are currently ordering their hitmen to commit terrorism (dropping bombs, killing civilians) against multiple countries at once. When you throw sand in people's faces - especially those without the means to fight back - don't be surprised when it boomerangs.

Cornel West Is Right

It's hard for me to find many things that I agree with Cornel West on, but he is absolutely right when he calls Dear Leader "an extension of the corporate state."

It is absurd to call President Barack Obama a “socialist” when he is “very much an extension of the corporate state that has been squeezing out the juices of our democracy,” according to Princeton professor and famed black intellectual Cornel West.

West, who had been a supporter of Obama, called the president “another black mascot” of “Wall Street oligarchs” on an MSNBC panel in April. He stood by and clarified by those remarks Wednesday on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight.

“I supported by dear brother Barack Obama because I wanted to bring an end to the age of Reagan, greed running amok, indifference to poor people, and highly polarized body politic,” he said. “When he moves into office, who do we get? We get his economic team coming right out of Wall Street.”

West refused to say that he would vote for Obama again.

 

Your Tax Dollars At Work

A couple of stories caught my eye today concerning the bureaucratic web of inefficiency, injustice, corruption, and outright violence that is coercive government.

In my home state of California, the people calling themselves the "Department of Motor Vehicles" sent out 60,000 disabled parking placards...to dead people.

The US government spent $300 million on some Socialist Navy ships that were never finished or put into service. "Well, now we know why they're called ghost fleets. They haunt taxpayers with costs for decades and, once we see the cost for getting rid of them, we all want to drop dead," said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union.

A recent US drone strike vaporized four civilians, and injured dozens more.

In an apparent effort to outdo the California DMV, Florida made $63 million selling off the private information of drivers.

Anthony Gregory discusses the massive amounts of welfare that the rich, corporations, and special interests get from Leviathan and how "our" Congresscritters or Caesar never mention cutting these reverse Robin hood programs.

A mentally handicapped 30-year old was pepper-sprayed, shot with a pepper-ball gun, and severely beaten by nine armed uniformed tax-feeding State thugs (sometimes referred to as "our boys in blue") after they mistook him for a robber. Serve and protect?

Keep working and paying your extortion racket taxes, folks, the sweat off your brow is being put to good use.

Free Market Money

My weekly column for PolicyMic.

Bail Out Borders!

Borders is bankrupt, and Anthony Gregory gives us a few reasons to cheer that this brick-and-mortar mega bookstore is going out of business.

Yet for the consumers, the downfall of Borders is glorious, much as was its climb to success. In the rearrangement of resources to serve customers we see the beautiful actions of the market economy reconfiguring the world to provide the goods and services that are most wanted and needed in the most effective way. To ignore the upside to Borders’ downfall is as fallacious as to focus only on the downside of its upswing, as did most of the anti-corporate left in the last decade. But today we see that it was not government, nor socialist agitation, that brought the axe down on this big company. It was the matrix of demand provided by customers. It was the consumer base, acting in a manner much more democratic in the good sense of the word, and much more peaceful and socially productive, than anything we see in the political process. Thank goodness there is no doctrine of “too big to fail” in the book store industries. If the government bailed out Borders as it has so many financial institutions, surely the customers would suffer.

Whereas socialists of all parties cheer on the peaceful transfer of power following the election season, they ignore the violent nature of that power and the inherent conflict in the process. With economic “power,” however, the situation is different: Borders losing out to other alternatives truly is a peaceful process, one to be celebrated for all its compatibility with a socially harmonious world.

The failure of Borders is a beautiful thing, coming as it does from the market process. If voluntary competition should one day bring Amazon.com down, in the midst of a competing commercial success today unimaginable but even more friendly to consumers than that wonderful online store, we will again have reason to celebrate.

The Financial Costs Of The Warfare State

The Holy American Empire of 1,200 bases, secret prisons, nuclear-armed ships, foreign welfare, six wars, and countless tons of munitions costs every American family an estimated $10,000 a year. Every year. And for all the talk we hear about cutting "entitlements," the guaranteed entitlements to Lockhead, Raytheon, Caterpillar, GE, and Boeing are never on the chopping block. What will it take for Americans to demand an end to the tax-spewing, wealth-destroying empire?