إن قال لك أحد عظم الله أجركم فلا تعتقله بشبهة أنه اخونجي.. فغالبية شعبك من المؤمنين وان لم يكن لهؤلاء نصيب في الحكم أو التقرب منك. سمعت أن طائرة رئاسية خاصة نقلت حفيدك الى فرنسا بينما تُمنع عربة إطفاء وإنقاذ جلبها متبرعون بريطانيون ومنهم النائب جورج غالاوي من دخول غزة والعمل على رفع الأنقاض من فوق جثث أطفالها.. هل تعلم أن هؤلاء الانجليز قد فقدو الأمل بإدخال العربة وأعادوها الى ليبيا مؤقتا؟؟ وفي اليوم الذي عادت طائرتك الرئاسية بحفيدك بعد أن قضى الله التعجيل بأجله, يتم منع وفد طبي من دخول غزة؟ ماذا لو مُنع الأطباء عن حفيدك وهو في شدة المرض يا سيادة الرئيس؟ ولمَ قبلتم بنقله الى فرنسا؟ أما أخبروك أن أحسن الفرق الطبية الاجنبية يتم احتجازها حاليا خارج معبر رفح المغلق غير بعيد عن مكان اجازتك الدائمة في شرم الشيخ هل أخبرك رئيس مخابراتك أنه في الوقت الذي تدفن فيه أنت حفيدك, يقوم الفلسطينون بدفن الطفل ربحي جندية الذي يصغر حفيدك بعامين والذي مات أمس بعد طول عناء من المرض والوهن هل تعلم أنه كان يتبول دماً منذ أذار الماضي دون أن يقوى الاطباء على تشخيص مرضه أو أن يسمح له بالسفر للعلاج؟؟؟ ربما كان ألم رحيل الولد أخف وطأة من مرارة شعور أب بقلة ذات الحيلة.. وهو يرى جسد ابنه الضعيف يذبل شيئا فشيئا.. بينما يقوم الأمن بحراسة أقفال المعبر المغلق تنفيذا لأوامركم ؟ لم يطلب أحد استعارة طائرتك الرئاسية لنقل الطفل ربحي... بل كان أهله سيكتفون بنقله على حمار عبر معبر رفح فيما لو سمح ذلك البغل الذي يغلق المعبر لهم بالوصول الى الجانب الاخر من السجن الغزّي؟ فراق الحبيب مؤلم يا سيادة الريّس!! لكنه لا يعادل شعور من امتزجت لديه لوعة فقدان الولد بالمرارة من ظلم الأخوة والقرف من سيادتكم وعظّم الله أجركم
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
لن يصلح حالكم السياسي والاقتصادي والاجتماعي إلا بالحرية..!
حقيقة من المؤسف مانراه من حالٍ , واحوالٍ داخل المجتمعات العربية ,والتي هي بلا شك نتيجة لأ نظمة سياسية استبدادية عقيمة أصلها قائم على سلوك خاطئ... انظمة أصل بدايتها كانت بداية اغتصاب لحق الاخر ومصادرة كل ما يمت للعدالة و المساواة و الحرية بصلة ...
ما نراه حقيقة في العالم العربي ليس سياسة وإنما هو خياسة !!... خياسة تحكم لها شعب خايس بكل ما تشير له هذه الكلمة من معنى .. شعوب وصلت إلى اعلى درجة من السذاجة على مستوى العالم, شعوب لاتفهم مالها وما عليها, شعوب مخدرة فكريا مهزومة نفسيا شعوب فاشلة علميا ... شعوب تعتاش بالانانية والكذب والنصب والدجل والخداع... شعوب تائهة مشرذمة فكريا واجتماعيا متسولة على تلك الشرذمة السياسية التي حكمت البلاد والعباد بطريقة تبدأ من مبدأ الافساد في الارض ...
حقيقة ذهبنا لمعظم مناطق الوطن العربي ومن لم نذهب إليه رايناه عبر وسائل الاعلام المختلفة ..صراحة شيئ يجلب الحزن والألم, وبنفس الوقت شيئ مقرف... شيئ يؤكد بأن الساسة ورجال الدين إنما هم فئة متآمرة يسلكون بهذه الشعوب طريق آخر طريق بدون إنارة طريق لايؤدي إلى النهضة ولا إلى العزة و لا إلى الكرامة... طريق مليئ بالنفايات طريق يدلل عليه الواقع من أرض الواقع...الوطن العربي اصبح في كل شيئ زبالة من الواقع ..
لاشك بأن التعليم ونتيجة التعليم السيئ وسياسة التعليم الفاسدة هي من اظهرت هذا الواقع الغير سوي الواقع المأساوي, واقع الارهاب واقع الحسد ,واقع الحقد واقع الكراهية والبغضاء ... التعليم اظهر لنا واقع أن يقبل المواطن بالحياة دون ان يكون هناك داعي لتطبيق العدالة أو أي داعي للمساواة أوأي داعي للحرية , التعليم العربي هو مجرد وسيلة لغسل عقول الشعوب من اجل ان تقبل الحاكم على ان له الحق فقط, ,ووقت ما يشاء ومن يريد معه من الناس للحصول على الحرية والعدالة والمساواة دون ان يحصل المواطن العربي الضعيف على المثل .. ذلك المواطن الذي هو مجرد شيئا متسولا على هامش من هوامش العدالة والمساواة والحرية ...
العدالة والمساواة الحرية في الوطن العربي ... ليست مهمة مادام عيال الشيوخ وعيال الفئة الخمس نجوم لهم الحق ان يحصلوا عليها وقت ما يشاؤون ووقت ما يرغبون بل مجاديف العدالة والمساواة تتكسر أمامهم عندما تريد ان تضعهم داخل نطاق ذلك الانسان الضعيف الذي هو يمثل الشريحة الكبيرة من المجتمع ..
لاشك بان الانظمة الحاكمة في العالم العربي اخرجت لنا مجتمعا معاقا... ومن داخل هذا المجتمع المعاق اخرجت لنا مجتمعين مجتمع يطبق عليه القانون الدكتاتوري لأنه الجاهل و الضعيف , ومجتمع آخر قدر له أن يسمو فوق القانون... القانون لايطبق عليه فأصبح المجتمع به مفكك... مجتمع ونقيضه .... مجتمع الانسان به يرى الانسان الاخر اكثر منه حظا و فرصة ومتعة في الحياة .. مجتمع نجد به من يحصل على كامل الحرية دون قيد أوشرط لأنه يمثل القوة... ومجتمع آخر مهان و ملعون ابو اسقافه لأنه يمثل الضعيف!!..
لاشك بأن الانظمة العربية انظمة فاشية على شعوبها... أنظمة سلبت من شعوبها الحرية حتى لاتفضحها وسلبت منها العزة والكرامة من أجل لا تحصل على العدل والمساواة ...
كلمة اهمسها في إذن كل مواطن ومواطنة عربية ...وأقول دون الحصول على الحق الكامل في الحرية مثل ما يحصل عليه المواطن الغربي فإنكم سوف تقبعون داخل حفرة فاسدة حفرة هي بمثابة مقبرة لكم .. حفرة لن تستطبعوا الخروج منها إلا بتطبيق تلك الحرية و التي هي من تجلب لكم العدالة والمساواة...
حقيقة الواقع المأساوي في الوطن العربي لايحتاج من ينتقده... فهو بنفسه أفضل من ينتقد نفسه !!...أفضل ناقد له هو الواقع نفسه, النظروا للواقع انظروا في كل شيئ وعلى كل شيئ !!.... الوطن العربي ظاهره هو أفضل ما ينتقد باطنه...
لاشك بأن الساسة العرب وظفوا وفي كل مكان الكتّاب البارزون ورجال الدين الدجالون من أجل التطبيل لهم في دعم مشاريعم الاستعمارية ... انهم ساسة مستعمرون للشعوب واوطان تلك الشعوب ... ان الشعوب بهم مخدوعة ....
كتبه مشعل الليبرالية
ما نراه حقيقة في العالم العربي ليس سياسة وإنما هو خياسة !!... خياسة تحكم لها شعب خايس بكل ما تشير له هذه الكلمة من معنى .. شعوب وصلت إلى اعلى درجة من السذاجة على مستوى العالم, شعوب لاتفهم مالها وما عليها, شعوب مخدرة فكريا مهزومة نفسيا شعوب فاشلة علميا ... شعوب تعتاش بالانانية والكذب والنصب والدجل والخداع... شعوب تائهة مشرذمة فكريا واجتماعيا متسولة على تلك الشرذمة السياسية التي حكمت البلاد والعباد بطريقة تبدأ من مبدأ الافساد في الارض ...
حقيقة ذهبنا لمعظم مناطق الوطن العربي ومن لم نذهب إليه رايناه عبر وسائل الاعلام المختلفة ..صراحة شيئ يجلب الحزن والألم, وبنفس الوقت شيئ مقرف... شيئ يؤكد بأن الساسة ورجال الدين إنما هم فئة متآمرة يسلكون بهذه الشعوب طريق آخر طريق بدون إنارة طريق لايؤدي إلى النهضة ولا إلى العزة و لا إلى الكرامة... طريق مليئ بالنفايات طريق يدلل عليه الواقع من أرض الواقع...الوطن العربي اصبح في كل شيئ زبالة من الواقع ..
لاشك بأن التعليم ونتيجة التعليم السيئ وسياسة التعليم الفاسدة هي من اظهرت هذا الواقع الغير سوي الواقع المأساوي, واقع الارهاب واقع الحسد ,واقع الحقد واقع الكراهية والبغضاء ... التعليم اظهر لنا واقع أن يقبل المواطن بالحياة دون ان يكون هناك داعي لتطبيق العدالة أو أي داعي للمساواة أوأي داعي للحرية , التعليم العربي هو مجرد وسيلة لغسل عقول الشعوب من اجل ان تقبل الحاكم على ان له الحق فقط, ,ووقت ما يشاء ومن يريد معه من الناس للحصول على الحرية والعدالة والمساواة دون ان يحصل المواطن العربي الضعيف على المثل .. ذلك المواطن الذي هو مجرد شيئا متسولا على هامش من هوامش العدالة والمساواة والحرية ...
العدالة والمساواة الحرية في الوطن العربي ... ليست مهمة مادام عيال الشيوخ وعيال الفئة الخمس نجوم لهم الحق ان يحصلوا عليها وقت ما يشاؤون ووقت ما يرغبون بل مجاديف العدالة والمساواة تتكسر أمامهم عندما تريد ان تضعهم داخل نطاق ذلك الانسان الضعيف الذي هو يمثل الشريحة الكبيرة من المجتمع ..
لاشك بان الانظمة الحاكمة في العالم العربي اخرجت لنا مجتمعا معاقا... ومن داخل هذا المجتمع المعاق اخرجت لنا مجتمعين مجتمع يطبق عليه القانون الدكتاتوري لأنه الجاهل و الضعيف , ومجتمع آخر قدر له أن يسمو فوق القانون... القانون لايطبق عليه فأصبح المجتمع به مفكك... مجتمع ونقيضه .... مجتمع الانسان به يرى الانسان الاخر اكثر منه حظا و فرصة ومتعة في الحياة .. مجتمع نجد به من يحصل على كامل الحرية دون قيد أوشرط لأنه يمثل القوة... ومجتمع آخر مهان و ملعون ابو اسقافه لأنه يمثل الضعيف!!..
لاشك بأن الانظمة العربية انظمة فاشية على شعوبها... أنظمة سلبت من شعوبها الحرية حتى لاتفضحها وسلبت منها العزة والكرامة من أجل لا تحصل على العدل والمساواة ...
كلمة اهمسها في إذن كل مواطن ومواطنة عربية ...وأقول دون الحصول على الحق الكامل في الحرية مثل ما يحصل عليه المواطن الغربي فإنكم سوف تقبعون داخل حفرة فاسدة حفرة هي بمثابة مقبرة لكم .. حفرة لن تستطبعوا الخروج منها إلا بتطبيق تلك الحرية و التي هي من تجلب لكم العدالة والمساواة...
حقيقة الواقع المأساوي في الوطن العربي لايحتاج من ينتقده... فهو بنفسه أفضل من ينتقد نفسه !!...أفضل ناقد له هو الواقع نفسه, النظروا للواقع انظروا في كل شيئ وعلى كل شيئ !!.... الوطن العربي ظاهره هو أفضل ما ينتقد باطنه...
لاشك بأن الساسة العرب وظفوا وفي كل مكان الكتّاب البارزون ورجال الدين الدجالون من أجل التطبيل لهم في دعم مشاريعم الاستعمارية ... انهم ساسة مستعمرون للشعوب واوطان تلك الشعوب ... ان الشعوب بهم مخدوعة ....
كتبه مشعل الليبرالية
Friday, March 13, 2009
A Corrupt World Financial System
Prologue
When Benjamin Franklin was called before the British Parliament in 1757 and asked to account for the prosperity in the American colonies. He replied, "That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one." It was the struggle for financial sovereignty that precipitated the American Revolution when the (Rothschild) Bank of England forced the colonists to give up their own currency.
That war never ended.
Throughout his political life Thomas Jefferson fought off the covert attempts of European bankers to control the nation’s money supply through a privately-owned central bank. Andrew Jackson succeeded in defeating these racketeers, nationalizing the banks and paying off the public debt. Our country then flourished without inflation. When Abraham Lincoln issued ‘greenbacks’ that deprived private bankers of their monopoly control of the nation’s money supply he was assassinated. The international bankers battled for more than a century to establish a private central bank in the United States with the exclusive right to print their own fiat notes and exchange them for government debt. They succeeded in 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act, a covert coup that authorized a private central bank to create money out of nothing, lend it to the government with interest and control the national money supply, expanding or contracting it at will. Representative Charles Lindbergh called the Act "the worst legislative crime of the ages." Fifty years later, President John F. Kennedy almost restored our Constitutional monetary system when he issued debt-free Treasury Notes. He too was assassinated.
The Systemic Usury Parasite
In 1913 our sovereign authority to create interest-free money was unconstitutionally transferred to a transnational private banking cartel that has systemically infected our economy with a staggering national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars. Eighty-five cents of every dollar is now consumed as “interest” by the systemic usury parasite, draining its host of vital resources and collapsing our economy in bankruptcy. Ours is not the only nation to succumb to systemic parasitism.
The Systemic Usury Parasite has infected 170 countries, feeding itself through the central bank syndicate, a shareholder-owned consortium of private banks. Each central bank parasite has an exclusive monopoly on its host government’s monetary system, with the power to create public debt and expand or contract the host’s economy at will. Coordinating their monetary policies with each other through the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers meet behind closed doors, appoint their own governors and set their own rules. Their books are not subject to audit by the individual governments that host them. The Bank for International Settlements originated as a Nazi money laundering operation and serves today as the cashiers window for the global casino. The IMF and World Bank tentacles of this parasite, infect unsuspecting governments with insurmountable debt, forcing these nations through “structural adjustment” policies to rob their taxpayers, slash beneficial social programs, transfer public assets to private owners and sell the nation’s treasures to transnational predators at fire sale prices. Government treasuries are the parasite’s host. Why rob just one bank when you can rob the whole nation? And why rob just one country when you can rob them all? Flushing the global economy of this systemic parasite begins with understanding how its debilitating web of debt is manufactured.
Although governments have inherent authority to create their own money, they foolishly borrow it from central banks, with interest. A central bank fabricates fiat notes (paper money) and credit by “lending” them into existence, in return for treasury bonds of the host government ~ taxpayer IOUs. This “money” has no pre-existing substance in reality and is conjured up through accounting entries. It is literally created out of nothing. The central bank first lends these accounting entries to its private owners and then to its downline commercial banks with interest. The commercial banks are permitted to lend nine times the amount of their borrowed accounting entries held “in reserve”. This nine-fold multiplication of borrowed accounting entries is described as “fractional reserve banking.” When borrowers accept these accounting entry loans they create massive inflation of the money supply which devalues the currency. These accounting entry loans must be “paid back” with compound interest that multiplies exponentially. More money must then be fabricated to pay this interest. Thus, all “money” that enters circulation is actually debt contrived by fictitious accounting entries. Every fiat dollar is an IOU from a borrower to a lender. A debt-based monetary system can never achieve equilibrium because compound interest always overwhelms the escalating money supply and eventually causes systemic collapse.
Organized Crime
Today the nation is essentially bankrupt and hoping Barack Obama’s team of Wall Street advisors will forestall economic collapse. This expectation is equivalent to hoping that Al Capone will make our streets safe. The economic recovery team is a Trojan horse filled with the same Wall Street racketeers that infected the global economy with a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, using deliberately deregulated mechanisms. They have successfully held the nation hostage with a universal credit freeze and threats of systemic collapse if trillions of dollars in ransom demands are not met. But why would our government agree to double its public debt to save ruthless gamblers from bankruptcy? Why would our government re-victimize taxpayers who did not participate in this global fraud and whose investments, retirement savings, pension plans and real estate values have already been eviscerated by these swindlers? The answer is that the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have historically represented a parasitic transnational crime syndicate, not the host government and its taxpayers.
The US Government is an instrument of the organized crime syndicate described alternatively as the Washington Consensus, the Octopus, the Shadow Government, the New World Order and Wall Street. This syndicate of transnational racketeers includes bankers, interlocking corporate directors, American, European and Asian “royal” families, cocaine and opium drug traffickers, illegal weapons dealers and kingpin controllers of blood diamonds, gold and oil. From the very beginning of America’s fledgling democracy these international predators surreptitiously gained control of the railroads, banks, oil and vital infrastructure, using a maze of corporations, offshore banks and holding companies that disguised foreign ownership of national resources. During the 19th and 20th centuries this syndicate secured private ownership of vital infrastructure and natural resources worldwide by engineering wars and assassinating democratic leaders. They financed Trotsky, Lenin and Hitler, using syndicate members within the Treasury and Federal Reserve to protect “their” international assets. Thomas Lamont, a JP Morgan banker, who was the US Treasury’s representative at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles negotiations, personally raised $100 million to finance Benito Mussolini. William Boyce Thompson, director of the New York Federal Reserve traveled to Russia to destabilize the Bolshevik Revolution, ensuring that railroads, banks, oil and vital resources would remain in private hands.Across the globe democratically elected leaders were deposed or assassinated that dared to return natural resources to their people. Two notorious Nazi collaborators, Allen Dulles (CIA director) and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State), were Wall Street attorneys who worked for the syndicate to brutally suppress every democratic uprising that threatened their control over national assets that rightfully belong to sovereign nations.
General Smedley Butler is best remembered today for his oft-quoted statement in the socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935: "I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.... Looking back on it, I felt I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."
Wall Street racketeers who bribed members of Congress to deregulate Wall Street, could not have held our nation hostage without collusion from the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman. They are members of the crime syndicate that loots governments through the central bank system and private equity firms like JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Carlyle. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a Goldman Sachs CEO, is also a member of Robber Barons, Inc ~ the IMF Board of Governors. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers organized the looting of Russia, stripping one trillion dollars from Russia’s struggling economy and shifting state-owned assets to private owners. Larry Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary in 1999, marking their success in repealing Depression-era laws that banned the merger of banks, brokers, insurance firms and investment banks. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Rubin joined CEO Sanford Weill at Citigroup, the first financial institution to fully embrace the Rubin-led repeal. At Rubin’s urging, Citigroup thrived by bundling loans as securities (mortgages, credit card loans, auto loans, student loans) and selling them as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Concurrently Larry Summers championed the deregulation of financial derivatives, ensuring the globalization of losses from those securities. With $2 trillion in junk loans, Citigroup fraud has metastasized to 100 countries making it too infectious to quarantine (“too big to fail”). Rubin protégés advised Obama that taxpayers should assume responsibility for $306 billion of Citigroup’s junk loans. Rockefeller owns Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, two of the investment banks that own the Federal Reserve. Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, is a Board Director at the central bank headquarters, the Bank for International Settlements, and is a protégé of Henry Kissinger, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.
Financial Terrorism
Author Bernard Lietaer, a former central banker, writes in “The Future of Money:”
"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stock markets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-95, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."
These emergencies are also the hallmark of the transnational crime syndicate controlling the global economy through financial terrorism. Collapsing healthy economies with currency speculation, fabricating trillions of dollars in fictitious debt and destroying productive businesses with short selling, these vultures have swarmed across the globe devouring one nation after another. The US is their current target.
Another Board Director at the predatory Bank for International Settlements, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used the standard Rockefeller-Rothschild blueprint for engineering the US financial collapse: deliberately expanding cheap credit to inflate the web of debt, entice rampant speculation and then suddenly withholding credit to violently contract the economy. A tactic used by Rothschild’s Bank of England to rob and control its colonies, this violent contraction catalyzes waves of foreclosures, bankruptcies and layoffs that force sellers to accept pennies on the dollar for their assets. Alternatively described as Milton Friedman’s economic ‘Shock Treatment’ and Henry Kissinger’s blueprint for “making the economy scream,” this financial terrorism is a psychopathic formula to bring a nation to its knees.
Instead of allowing a handful of corrupt Wall Street investment banks to implode from well-deserved bankruptcy, The Swindler Bailout engineered by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve extorts trillions of taxpayer dollars to purchase worthless junk loans from racketeers, reimburse speculators for their gambling losses, finance mergers and acquisitions to devour healthy banks and concentrate unearned wealth in expanded syndicate banking monopolies. Government loans could have been directly issued to victims of predatory lenders to refinance the mortgages that have devastated home values nationwide. Instead, taxpayer loans to the generators of these toxic assets reward criminals and simultaneously drain the US Treasury. Insurmountable debt, engineered by the Systemic Usury Parasite and compounded by the Swindler Bailout, lays the groundwork for “structurally adjusting” the American economy, permanently stripping citizens of their remaining assets, health care protection and their confiscated wages held in trust by the Social Security Administration. This premeditated Grand Theft is the prelude for national insolvency and subsequent sale of the nation’s assets to transnational pirates.
Disintegration is a Blessing
Reuters reported in February that renowned investor George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis. We needn’t wait to see how thugs might resolve the crisis. It would be much wiser to take the path of least resistance and prevent economic collapse by making the systemic correction that is long overdue.
Imagine for a moment that worldwide governments had retained their exclusive authority to create money and control credit and had strictly regulated the transparent movement of capital within their own borders. Had they remained autonomous, systemic global collapse would not have been possible. US investment banks could not have infected foreign banks and collapsed Iceland’s economy. Small, autonomous units counteract systemic risk by isolating disease and preventing it from metastasizing to the whole system, as nature wisely demonstrates. This “disintegration” of the world financial system is an opportunity to dis – integrate every transnational conglomerate that binds all systems together in one monolithic web of systemic debt. Autonomous interest-free monetary systems that support small community banks, small farms and local producers of goods and services would protect self-sustaining economies from the systemic risk caused by the contagious collapse of intertwined conglomerates. Monopoly strangleholds on any commodity or economic system are lethal by nature. The greater their scope, the greater the risk of contagious catastrophic collapse ~ a fact we are now witnessing.
Dis – integrating the parasitic central bank syndicate that is strangling every country with insurmountable debt must be accompanied by effective quarantine of the global gambling casino: replace the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial banks (public savings) and reckless investment banks; strictly regulate commodities futures and derivatives trades; ban over-the-counter transactions that are not transparent; criminalize anti-social speculation that artificially drives up the price of essential commodities and threatens public welfare; prosecute naked short sellers that collapse healthy businesses; enforce anti-trust laws that separate large investment sectors in finance, insurance, and real estate; dis – integrate every multinational conglomerate that is too criminal to care and too big to jail; end the fabrication of accounting entry debt by reforming the monetary system to issue and regulate credit through a transparent and strictly controlled public agency and localize every system that is critical to social functioning.
Isolating and strictly regulating Wall Street and offshore casinos to prevent gambling addicts from devastating the productive economy may eventually protect the global financial system from organized crime but its victims will never be reimbursed for their losses. Productive workers who lost their life savings and retirement pensions slowly accumulated over a lifetime of contributing have been thoroughly robbed by sociopaths who instantly amassed unearned wealth by parasitic gambling that contributes nothing of value. They will retire, without being prosecuted, in luxury.
The Mechanics of Money
Money is not a commodity. It is a token of value. Any two people can transfer whatever they like as a medium of exchange. We agree as a group to use one medium of exchange to simplify transactions. The purpose of inventing a medium of exchange is to sustain the flow of goods and services circulating in an economy. If we agreed to use gold or feathers as tokens, the medium of exchange would be finite and too scarce to meet everyone’s needs ~ and a finite physical commodity can be monopolized by individuals who might hoard the tokens and constrict the flow of goods and services that are needed by everyone in society. Paper is plentiful. In theory, we agree to the fiction that paper money and computer credits have value in order to produce and exchange the commodities we need. But they have no intrinsic value.
The pieces of paper and computer entries that are fabricated by private corporations, what we call money, can and should be created and regulated by a legitimate public agency. It is irrational to transfer this vital social function to private corporations that thrive on usury and destabilize economies by expanding and contracting fabricated credit. Usury is not a fact of life, an inherent condition one finds throughout the natural world. It is a man-made concept that could create opportunities for cultures to expand productive activities but which has been historically used by parasites that eventually kill the host.
Money and credit can and should be used to keep the economy flowing, facilitating the exchange of real goods and productive services that meet the needs of society ~ without fabricating debilitating and fictitious debt. This, in fact, was the intention of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution that authorized only Congress to coin money and regulate its value. The founders of our nation understood that a government does not need to borrow its money from a private corporation. It has the power to create its own money. We are that government and that power belongs to us.
Our government has the constitutional authority to create money and issue credit without ever charging interest or creating debt. It can directly spend this money into circulation and extinguish excess currency to prevent inflation. Or it can charge a reasonable interest rate and use this revenue in lieu of taxes. Publicly-owned community banks could charge a moderate interest rate that is returned to depositors as dividends, or it could be used to generate revenue for implementing worthwhile social projects. Monetary science comes equipped with mathematical formulas to achieve permanent monetary equilibrium through a set of principles that balance the money supply and maintain currency stability, eliminating recessions, depressions, inflation and deflation forever. A debt-free monetary system can be mathematically regulated to facilitate the flow of goods and services as a public service. The mechanics have been understood for centuries. All that is required is social consensus.
Decentralizing the banking system would dis-integrate the global stranglehold of transnational racketeers and provide protection from future systemic collapse. Geraldine Perry has suggested that if banks are to remain privately owned they must be required to operate as independent businesses with 100% reserves and use their own capital for loans, not fictitious accounting entries and not other people's money. The national money supply would be issued by a public monetary authority. Banks would operate as any other business should and they would be regulated by the local governmental entities where they are located, thereby eliminating the need for a national regulatory scheme.
Completely abolishing the privatization of the national money and credit supply would liberate human energy to create a world of abundance in which every human community could produce and exchange the goods and services it needs without ever being enslaved by fictitious debt. Government control of the national money supply would prevent inflation and escalating debt by issuing constitutional interest-free money. Moderate interest rates could then be used to finance the operations of city, state and federal government in lieu of taxes. Two brilliant authors, attorney Ellen Brown and historian Stephen Zarlenga have articulated sound mechanics for a publicly-owned monetary system. All that remains is public demand for this reform.
What is most essential to liberating humankind from centuries of covert suppression by parasitic racketeers is financial sovereignty. Political freedom without economic freedom is meaningless. The self-induced implosion of a corrupt financial system provides our generation with a precious opportunity to secure the blessings of liberty envisioned by our ancestors and finish the American Revolution.
When Benjamin Franklin was called before the British Parliament in 1757 and asked to account for the prosperity in the American colonies. He replied, "That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one." It was the struggle for financial sovereignty that precipitated the American Revolution when the (Rothschild) Bank of England forced the colonists to give up their own currency.
That war never ended.
Throughout his political life Thomas Jefferson fought off the covert attempts of European bankers to control the nation’s money supply through a privately-owned central bank. Andrew Jackson succeeded in defeating these racketeers, nationalizing the banks and paying off the public debt. Our country then flourished without inflation. When Abraham Lincoln issued ‘greenbacks’ that deprived private bankers of their monopoly control of the nation’s money supply he was assassinated. The international bankers battled for more than a century to establish a private central bank in the United States with the exclusive right to print their own fiat notes and exchange them for government debt. They succeeded in 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act, a covert coup that authorized a private central bank to create money out of nothing, lend it to the government with interest and control the national money supply, expanding or contracting it at will. Representative Charles Lindbergh called the Act "the worst legislative crime of the ages." Fifty years later, President John F. Kennedy almost restored our Constitutional monetary system when he issued debt-free Treasury Notes. He too was assassinated.
The Systemic Usury Parasite
In 1913 our sovereign authority to create interest-free money was unconstitutionally transferred to a transnational private banking cartel that has systemically infected our economy with a staggering national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars. Eighty-five cents of every dollar is now consumed as “interest” by the systemic usury parasite, draining its host of vital resources and collapsing our economy in bankruptcy. Ours is not the only nation to succumb to systemic parasitism.
The Systemic Usury Parasite has infected 170 countries, feeding itself through the central bank syndicate, a shareholder-owned consortium of private banks. Each central bank parasite has an exclusive monopoly on its host government’s monetary system, with the power to create public debt and expand or contract the host’s economy at will. Coordinating their monetary policies with each other through the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers meet behind closed doors, appoint their own governors and set their own rules. Their books are not subject to audit by the individual governments that host them. The Bank for International Settlements originated as a Nazi money laundering operation and serves today as the cashiers window for the global casino. The IMF and World Bank tentacles of this parasite, infect unsuspecting governments with insurmountable debt, forcing these nations through “structural adjustment” policies to rob their taxpayers, slash beneficial social programs, transfer public assets to private owners and sell the nation’s treasures to transnational predators at fire sale prices. Government treasuries are the parasite’s host. Why rob just one bank when you can rob the whole nation? And why rob just one country when you can rob them all? Flushing the global economy of this systemic parasite begins with understanding how its debilitating web of debt is manufactured.
Although governments have inherent authority to create their own money, they foolishly borrow it from central banks, with interest. A central bank fabricates fiat notes (paper money) and credit by “lending” them into existence, in return for treasury bonds of the host government ~ taxpayer IOUs. This “money” has no pre-existing substance in reality and is conjured up through accounting entries. It is literally created out of nothing. The central bank first lends these accounting entries to its private owners and then to its downline commercial banks with interest. The commercial banks are permitted to lend nine times the amount of their borrowed accounting entries held “in reserve”. This nine-fold multiplication of borrowed accounting entries is described as “fractional reserve banking.” When borrowers accept these accounting entry loans they create massive inflation of the money supply which devalues the currency. These accounting entry loans must be “paid back” with compound interest that multiplies exponentially. More money must then be fabricated to pay this interest. Thus, all “money” that enters circulation is actually debt contrived by fictitious accounting entries. Every fiat dollar is an IOU from a borrower to a lender. A debt-based monetary system can never achieve equilibrium because compound interest always overwhelms the escalating money supply and eventually causes systemic collapse.
Organized Crime
Today the nation is essentially bankrupt and hoping Barack Obama’s team of Wall Street advisors will forestall economic collapse. This expectation is equivalent to hoping that Al Capone will make our streets safe. The economic recovery team is a Trojan horse filled with the same Wall Street racketeers that infected the global economy with a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, using deliberately deregulated mechanisms. They have successfully held the nation hostage with a universal credit freeze and threats of systemic collapse if trillions of dollars in ransom demands are not met. But why would our government agree to double its public debt to save ruthless gamblers from bankruptcy? Why would our government re-victimize taxpayers who did not participate in this global fraud and whose investments, retirement savings, pension plans and real estate values have already been eviscerated by these swindlers? The answer is that the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have historically represented a parasitic transnational crime syndicate, not the host government and its taxpayers.
The US Government is an instrument of the organized crime syndicate described alternatively as the Washington Consensus, the Octopus, the Shadow Government, the New World Order and Wall Street. This syndicate of transnational racketeers includes bankers, interlocking corporate directors, American, European and Asian “royal” families, cocaine and opium drug traffickers, illegal weapons dealers and kingpin controllers of blood diamonds, gold and oil. From the very beginning of America’s fledgling democracy these international predators surreptitiously gained control of the railroads, banks, oil and vital infrastructure, using a maze of corporations, offshore banks and holding companies that disguised foreign ownership of national resources. During the 19th and 20th centuries this syndicate secured private ownership of vital infrastructure and natural resources worldwide by engineering wars and assassinating democratic leaders. They financed Trotsky, Lenin and Hitler, using syndicate members within the Treasury and Federal Reserve to protect “their” international assets. Thomas Lamont, a JP Morgan banker, who was the US Treasury’s representative at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles negotiations, personally raised $100 million to finance Benito Mussolini. William Boyce Thompson, director of the New York Federal Reserve traveled to Russia to destabilize the Bolshevik Revolution, ensuring that railroads, banks, oil and vital resources would remain in private hands.Across the globe democratically elected leaders were deposed or assassinated that dared to return natural resources to their people. Two notorious Nazi collaborators, Allen Dulles (CIA director) and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State), were Wall Street attorneys who worked for the syndicate to brutally suppress every democratic uprising that threatened their control over national assets that rightfully belong to sovereign nations.
General Smedley Butler is best remembered today for his oft-quoted statement in the socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935: "I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.... Looking back on it, I felt I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."
Wall Street racketeers who bribed members of Congress to deregulate Wall Street, could not have held our nation hostage without collusion from the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman. They are members of the crime syndicate that loots governments through the central bank system and private equity firms like JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Carlyle. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a Goldman Sachs CEO, is also a member of Robber Barons, Inc ~ the IMF Board of Governors. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers organized the looting of Russia, stripping one trillion dollars from Russia’s struggling economy and shifting state-owned assets to private owners. Larry Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary in 1999, marking their success in repealing Depression-era laws that banned the merger of banks, brokers, insurance firms and investment banks. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Rubin joined CEO Sanford Weill at Citigroup, the first financial institution to fully embrace the Rubin-led repeal. At Rubin’s urging, Citigroup thrived by bundling loans as securities (mortgages, credit card loans, auto loans, student loans) and selling them as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Concurrently Larry Summers championed the deregulation of financial derivatives, ensuring the globalization of losses from those securities. With $2 trillion in junk loans, Citigroup fraud has metastasized to 100 countries making it too infectious to quarantine (“too big to fail”). Rubin protégés advised Obama that taxpayers should assume responsibility for $306 billion of Citigroup’s junk loans. Rockefeller owns Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, two of the investment banks that own the Federal Reserve. Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, is a Board Director at the central bank headquarters, the Bank for International Settlements, and is a protégé of Henry Kissinger, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.
Financial Terrorism
Author Bernard Lietaer, a former central banker, writes in “The Future of Money:”
"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stock markets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-95, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."
These emergencies are also the hallmark of the transnational crime syndicate controlling the global economy through financial terrorism. Collapsing healthy economies with currency speculation, fabricating trillions of dollars in fictitious debt and destroying productive businesses with short selling, these vultures have swarmed across the globe devouring one nation after another. The US is their current target.
Another Board Director at the predatory Bank for International Settlements, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used the standard Rockefeller-Rothschild blueprint for engineering the US financial collapse: deliberately expanding cheap credit to inflate the web of debt, entice rampant speculation and then suddenly withholding credit to violently contract the economy. A tactic used by Rothschild’s Bank of England to rob and control its colonies, this violent contraction catalyzes waves of foreclosures, bankruptcies and layoffs that force sellers to accept pennies on the dollar for their assets. Alternatively described as Milton Friedman’s economic ‘Shock Treatment’ and Henry Kissinger’s blueprint for “making the economy scream,” this financial terrorism is a psychopathic formula to bring a nation to its knees.
Instead of allowing a handful of corrupt Wall Street investment banks to implode from well-deserved bankruptcy, The Swindler Bailout engineered by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve extorts trillions of taxpayer dollars to purchase worthless junk loans from racketeers, reimburse speculators for their gambling losses, finance mergers and acquisitions to devour healthy banks and concentrate unearned wealth in expanded syndicate banking monopolies. Government loans could have been directly issued to victims of predatory lenders to refinance the mortgages that have devastated home values nationwide. Instead, taxpayer loans to the generators of these toxic assets reward criminals and simultaneously drain the US Treasury. Insurmountable debt, engineered by the Systemic Usury Parasite and compounded by the Swindler Bailout, lays the groundwork for “structurally adjusting” the American economy, permanently stripping citizens of their remaining assets, health care protection and their confiscated wages held in trust by the Social Security Administration. This premeditated Grand Theft is the prelude for national insolvency and subsequent sale of the nation’s assets to transnational pirates.
Disintegration is a Blessing
Reuters reported in February that renowned investor George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis. We needn’t wait to see how thugs might resolve the crisis. It would be much wiser to take the path of least resistance and prevent economic collapse by making the systemic correction that is long overdue.
Imagine for a moment that worldwide governments had retained their exclusive authority to create money and control credit and had strictly regulated the transparent movement of capital within their own borders. Had they remained autonomous, systemic global collapse would not have been possible. US investment banks could not have infected foreign banks and collapsed Iceland’s economy. Small, autonomous units counteract systemic risk by isolating disease and preventing it from metastasizing to the whole system, as nature wisely demonstrates. This “disintegration” of the world financial system is an opportunity to dis – integrate every transnational conglomerate that binds all systems together in one monolithic web of systemic debt. Autonomous interest-free monetary systems that support small community banks, small farms and local producers of goods and services would protect self-sustaining economies from the systemic risk caused by the contagious collapse of intertwined conglomerates. Monopoly strangleholds on any commodity or economic system are lethal by nature. The greater their scope, the greater the risk of contagious catastrophic collapse ~ a fact we are now witnessing.
Dis – integrating the parasitic central bank syndicate that is strangling every country with insurmountable debt must be accompanied by effective quarantine of the global gambling casino: replace the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial banks (public savings) and reckless investment banks; strictly regulate commodities futures and derivatives trades; ban over-the-counter transactions that are not transparent; criminalize anti-social speculation that artificially drives up the price of essential commodities and threatens public welfare; prosecute naked short sellers that collapse healthy businesses; enforce anti-trust laws that separate large investment sectors in finance, insurance, and real estate; dis – integrate every multinational conglomerate that is too criminal to care and too big to jail; end the fabrication of accounting entry debt by reforming the monetary system to issue and regulate credit through a transparent and strictly controlled public agency and localize every system that is critical to social functioning.
Isolating and strictly regulating Wall Street and offshore casinos to prevent gambling addicts from devastating the productive economy may eventually protect the global financial system from organized crime but its victims will never be reimbursed for their losses. Productive workers who lost their life savings and retirement pensions slowly accumulated over a lifetime of contributing have been thoroughly robbed by sociopaths who instantly amassed unearned wealth by parasitic gambling that contributes nothing of value. They will retire, without being prosecuted, in luxury.
The Mechanics of Money
Money is not a commodity. It is a token of value. Any two people can transfer whatever they like as a medium of exchange. We agree as a group to use one medium of exchange to simplify transactions. The purpose of inventing a medium of exchange is to sustain the flow of goods and services circulating in an economy. If we agreed to use gold or feathers as tokens, the medium of exchange would be finite and too scarce to meet everyone’s needs ~ and a finite physical commodity can be monopolized by individuals who might hoard the tokens and constrict the flow of goods and services that are needed by everyone in society. Paper is plentiful. In theory, we agree to the fiction that paper money and computer credits have value in order to produce and exchange the commodities we need. But they have no intrinsic value.
The pieces of paper and computer entries that are fabricated by private corporations, what we call money, can and should be created and regulated by a legitimate public agency. It is irrational to transfer this vital social function to private corporations that thrive on usury and destabilize economies by expanding and contracting fabricated credit. Usury is not a fact of life, an inherent condition one finds throughout the natural world. It is a man-made concept that could create opportunities for cultures to expand productive activities but which has been historically used by parasites that eventually kill the host.
Money and credit can and should be used to keep the economy flowing, facilitating the exchange of real goods and productive services that meet the needs of society ~ without fabricating debilitating and fictitious debt. This, in fact, was the intention of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution that authorized only Congress to coin money and regulate its value. The founders of our nation understood that a government does not need to borrow its money from a private corporation. It has the power to create its own money. We are that government and that power belongs to us.
Our government has the constitutional authority to create money and issue credit without ever charging interest or creating debt. It can directly spend this money into circulation and extinguish excess currency to prevent inflation. Or it can charge a reasonable interest rate and use this revenue in lieu of taxes. Publicly-owned community banks could charge a moderate interest rate that is returned to depositors as dividends, or it could be used to generate revenue for implementing worthwhile social projects. Monetary science comes equipped with mathematical formulas to achieve permanent monetary equilibrium through a set of principles that balance the money supply and maintain currency stability, eliminating recessions, depressions, inflation and deflation forever. A debt-free monetary system can be mathematically regulated to facilitate the flow of goods and services as a public service. The mechanics have been understood for centuries. All that is required is social consensus.
Decentralizing the banking system would dis-integrate the global stranglehold of transnational racketeers and provide protection from future systemic collapse. Geraldine Perry has suggested that if banks are to remain privately owned they must be required to operate as independent businesses with 100% reserves and use their own capital for loans, not fictitious accounting entries and not other people's money. The national money supply would be issued by a public monetary authority. Banks would operate as any other business should and they would be regulated by the local governmental entities where they are located, thereby eliminating the need for a national regulatory scheme.
Completely abolishing the privatization of the national money and credit supply would liberate human energy to create a world of abundance in which every human community could produce and exchange the goods and services it needs without ever being enslaved by fictitious debt. Government control of the national money supply would prevent inflation and escalating debt by issuing constitutional interest-free money. Moderate interest rates could then be used to finance the operations of city, state and federal government in lieu of taxes. Two brilliant authors, attorney Ellen Brown and historian Stephen Zarlenga have articulated sound mechanics for a publicly-owned monetary system. All that remains is public demand for this reform.
What is most essential to liberating humankind from centuries of covert suppression by parasitic racketeers is financial sovereignty. Political freedom without economic freedom is meaningless. The self-induced implosion of a corrupt financial system provides our generation with a precious opportunity to secure the blessings of liberty envisioned by our ancestors and finish the American Revolution.
الويل لإيران من شر أقترب..؟!
تـنبعث في الأفق إرهاصات "تحدي" بين إيران ودول الخليج العربي ولو غضبت إيران وزمجرت فالويل لها ثم الويل لنا!! لقد أعلن التحدي مع إيران بنيرة الشاعر العربي المفوه: ألا لا يجهلن احد علينا .. فنجهل فوق جهل الجاهلينا!! (بالكلام فقط وما زلنا "كلام نواعم"!! فهذه باكستان الفقيرة التي فتحها غلام من غلمان الطائف امتلكت القنبلة النووية ووضعت لنفسها مركزا في موازين القوى)!! يا ليت شعري يا أبن كلثوم بماذا ستواجه دول الخليج التحدي الإيراني؟ هل تجد الحل في خنجر عماني مذهب مصنوع في كلكتا؟! أم بأكبر وأطول "بيرق" في العالم مصنوع من قماش مستورد؟!! أم أن الحل يأتي من عاصمة البغاء العالمية- المدينة النموذج- (لنا النموذج دون العالمين أو القبر)؟!! فهناك في مدينة ناطحات السحاب العربية جيش جرار يعمل على قدم وفخذ من اجل تأسيس صناعة!! للجنس والفجور على أرض الخير والحبور (أهكذا تشكر النعم يا غشم)؟؟! جلبوا العار باليورو والدولار ولم يرحموا الأخلاق والفضيلة بل ولم يرحموا الإنسانية؟!! هاهم قد مسحوا العنصر النسائي الجميل فقط!! من قرى طاجيكستان واوزباكستان (ولأن عربستان محتلة من إيران فقد حمى الله بناتها من تجارة الرقيق الأبيض!!) وانـتقلوا إلى رومانيا وهنغاريا ثم ومن لزوميات الحمية العربية المخلصة عبثوا بالطول و"العرض" في بلاد (من أحرق السفن وقال قولته الشهيرة "العدو من أمامكم والبحر من وراءكم وانتم اليوم يا عرب أضيع من الأيتام على مأدبة اللئام")!! ثم أتوا بالعربيات الماجدات!! يجرجن أذيالهن!! إلى حيث ألقت رحلها الموبقات والمسكرات والمخدرات!! أسطورة مدينتهم هذه أنها قلبت المعادلة فأصبح نسل مضر هم مصدر الجواري والقيان والراقصات والمومسات وجاء المتفرجون على اللحم العربي الأبيض المتوسط؟! من كل حدب وصوب الفرنج والخرنج والعلوج والهنوج . المدينة النموذج أنـتجت لنا النوع الثالث؟!! من العرب الذين تمنيت أن أموت قبل أن أراهم (العرب العارية- عرب بدون هدوم)!! نموذجهم هذا وصل إلى العالمية من أوسخ الأبواب وقد عمّر صرحاً من خرسانة فهوى في قاع كلخانه (تكرمون)؟!! صدق الوعد يا غثاء السيل، هاهم العرب الحفاة يتطاولون في البنيان ويتفاخرون بأطول برج وأجمل برج وأغرب مبنى وأجمل بناية وإنما في أحشاءها الفجور والخمور وكل ما في العالمين من شرور: أن الأبراج أن طالت مبانيها.. في أحشاءها عند مسيان العطب!! وكل ذلك على بعد فراسخ!! معدودة من ارض عاد وأرم ذات العماد التي لم يخلق مثلها في البلاد وذهبت في صبيحة واحدة لتكون اثأرا مندرسة تحت الرمال؟!! ويل لإيران فلدى دول الخليج قناة العربية وأسلحتها الفتاكة الرمحي والقيسي وعيدان و... (لكم الله يا أخوال الرسول)!! وعندما تـنتفض هذه المسماة .. ري.. ري.. (وش اسمها هذي حقت صناعة الموت)!! هذه المدعوة ريما خربانه ؟! فلن يـبقى في إيران حجر على حجر!! وسيشعر الإيرانيون بالحرج الشديد ويمتـنعون عن القتال مخافة أن يتم تصنيفهم مع أطفال حماس الذين يصنعون الموت لجنود العدو الصهيوني (استغفر الله هل قلت العدو الصهيوني!! جل من لا يهمل)!! ثم هناك "العربية نت"، ويلكم يا فارس جاءكم الموت على رأس فأره؟! ويقف خلفها عدد من "مجاهدي النت" وهم رجال!! أشداء على المؤمنين رحماء على الصهاينة؟! تراهم في المعركة سكارى وهم سكارى وسيلجمون التحدي الإيراني السافر بإحصائيات مهولة عن الشواذ والسحاقيات في دول الخليج وربما دعوا إلى الدفع بهم وبهن إلى الصفوف المنبطحة في المعركة المصيرية!! ولن يهدأ للعرب العارية هذه بال ولن يرتاح لهم سروال؟!! حتى يحشدوا مراكزهم ونواديهم وانجازاتهم الثـقافية لمواجهة التحدي الإيراني؟!! وفي الخط الأول هناك "مركز المسيار الوطني" (ولو نزعت نقطة من تحت الياء فلن يتغير المعنى)!! وهو المركز الوطني الوحيد في العالم وربما في التاريخ الذي يجمع معلومات ويعمل دراسات عن أسرار الوطن وخفايا الوطن وخبايا الوطن وثغرات الوطن (يا عزتي لك يا وطن)!! ثم يـبيعها بالدولار الملعون للاستخبارات الأمريكية والبريطانية والإسرائيلية والروسية واستخبارات سيرلنكا المركزية!! وربما يزود الاستخبارات الإيرانية ببعض المعلومات عن قضية "انـتهاك حقوق الشيعة" في الخليج!! ومشاكل تزويج القاصرات وقصص ظلم القضاة وتسلط الهيئات ولن يتحدث أحد عن تكميم الأفواه وخط الفقر الذي يضغط تحته نصف الشعب الذي يمشي حافيا وتحت قدميه أضخم الثروات في تاريخ الاقتصاد؟!! لعنك الله يا دولار كيف جردت أبناء الوطن من الوطنية؟!! ويل لإيران فلدى العرب المهووسة ذلك الموقع الالكتروني "إيلاف" (ملاحظة: النقط تحت الياء مع إن وضعها فوق الياء لا يغير المعنى)!! هذا الموقع سيكون حجر (غرشة)!! في طريق الأطماع الإيرانية!! فهم في إيلاف لا يعترفون بالموت ويقولون أن الله يأخذ إجازة (تعالى الله عما يقولون)!! ويعتقدون أن محمد (صلى الله عليه وسلم) كان مقاتلا دمويا تحركه الأطماع السياسية (بأبي أنت وأمي يا رسول الله)!! وعندما تدخل إتلاف ساحة الوغى ضد العدو الجديد فسيدوخ!! الإيرانيون من صور هاي رزلوشن!! لكل ما لذ وطاب من الفنانات والمطربات المائلات المميلات النامصات المنمصات ومعهن جوقة من (حليقي الشنبات)!! ولا عزاء للغيورين فقد رفعت المدينة الحجاب عن قاذورات إتلاف استعداد للمعركة ومنعت مواقع السكس والصداقات، وهي لعمري أرحم!! على الأقل الواحد ينظر إلي صور البنيات!! وعقله في رأسه وليس في رأس الماسونية؟!! وقلبه في صدره وليس في صدر البيت الأبيض!! وأين ستذهب إيران من صحافتـنا وكتابنا ورسامي الكاريكاتير وروايات السح الدح امبووو!! وحتى شعبان عبد الرحيم سيقلب الموازين (بكرهك يا إيران أنت وكل العربان العريان انين.... ثم نهيق متـقطع)؟! الويل والثبور لإيران الغبية عندما تـتولاها سياط وأنياب هؤلاء الذين عندما تسلموا ملف "الهيئة" جعلوا الناس بالكاد تنسى (كنتم خير أمة أخرجت للناس تأمرون بالمعروف وتـنهون عن المنكر)!! وعندما تولوا ملف السينما جعلوا من صالات الأفلام متطلب حضاري تـنافسي تـقني سيصعد بنا إلى مصاف موزمبيق؟!! وعندما حشدوا أقلامهم القذرة ضد حماس أصبح الواحد يلعب الكرة بهدوء مخافة أن يأخذ به "حماس" زائد فيصنف (ضد السامية)!! اعتقد انه سيقضي على إيران في ليلة حالكة!! من ليالي العرب الحمراء وسيلاحقهم المخرجون بإنـتاج أول فيلم سينمائي فيه ممثلة خليجية تمتـنع أمام الملأ عن أكل الكباب الإيراني (مرة واحده، يلعن أم التحدي)!! وستهبط النكات على الإيرانيين في "عيال قرية"؟! وليس من المستبعد أن تـنقطع عنهم "روتانا" فيصبحوا على ما فعلوا فرحانين؟! (وهنا نقترح أن تعطي إيران فرصة فليس لها قبل بكل هذه المصائب)!! خلاص، إيران انـتهت ويستعد بعض المثـقفين العرب لعقد ندوة عالمية هل تذكرون ذلك العربي الجاهلي الذي قاد قومه بني وائل (عنزه) وواجه جيوش كسري وحقق أول نصر عربي واضح لم يأت لتحريك المفاوضات أو لجبر الخواطر!! وكل ذلك من أجل امرأة عربية أهينت في بلاط كسري؟!! وهل تذكرون ذلك العربي نحيل جسمه رثة ثيابه دخل على كسري في قمة عنفوانه ورد على سؤاله (ماذا تريدون يا عرب؟) فقال تلك المقولة التاريخية "أتـينا لنخرج العباد من عبادة العباد إلى عبادة رب العباد"!! هذه عرب هلكت، وابتليـنا نحن الذين نعيش في عصر العرب العارية!! برجال رضوا وهم بكامل قواهم العقلية أن يكونوا عبيدا في مزرعة بوش الأب وبوش الابن وأخيرا أوباما الأسود (ليس عنده مزرعة ولكنها شقة ديلوكس في شيكاجوووو)!! وصدق عمر بن الخطاب رضي الله عنه عندما قال "نحن (العرب) قوم أعزنا الله بالإسلام ومهما ابتـغينا العزة بغيره أذلنا الله"!!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
We All Must Be Angry
One of the hardest things to deal with in the current economic depression is the disgusting hypocrisy of the U.S. congress, the new president, and the members of the Federal Reserve System. It is one thing to be told, as we all are, that we must hand over fat wads of our hard-earned money to these warmongering and thieving snakes or face jail terms, but one feels a whole new level of revulsion when these people make statements to the effect that they, and they alone, are in a position to "save the economy" by "creating jobs." These statements are made by people who have done virtually everything in their power to destroy the American economy over the last few decades, but who have now proclaimed themselves to be our saviors. Only the most naïve and unlearned among us could possibly be falling for the idea that a bunch of self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and bankers are going to "save" us from problems they have caused.
On its face, the idea that politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers could "save" the economy is laughable. These are people, after all, who live exclusively at our expense. That is, these are people whose entire livelihoods are dependent upon taking money away from productive people and spending it on themselves and their favorite wasteful projects. It's true that they do not all share the same ideas about how to spend the money they take from us. Some prefer to use it to blow up innocent people in foreign lands, while others simply want to take our hard-earned money without our consent and hand it over to other people. The bankers, on the other hand, merely content themselves with printing vast amounts of new money out of thin air that they either hand over to the Treasury Department, or gift to their other banker-buddies to lend out at a profit at our expense. Nevertheless, it should be crystal clear that these people do not actually produce anything themselves (except the bankers, who are very skilled counterfeiters of money). They take money from us through taxation and inflation, (and threaten us with severe punishments if we refuse to obey), and then spend every last penny of it – and more – on war, socialized boondoggles, and welfare. These are the people who would have us believe that they can "save" the economy? How exactly would they accomplish such a thing? More taxes, more idiotic socialized projects, more war, and more newly-printed green paper? Do these actions really seem likely to produce a vibrant and healthy economy, or do they seem more like the actions undertaken by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.?
They would also very much like for us to believe that they are the only people in the world capable of "creating jobs" in the United States. A more ridiculous idea would be hard to find. Again, these people are only in the business of taking money from productive people, and either wasting it entirely (e.g., war), keeping it themselves, or giving it to other people (e.g., entitlement programs, foreign aid, and paychecks for bureaucrats). As such, any actions undertaken by these people will necessarily depend for funding upon those who are forced to pay taxes; namely, the increasingly-dwindling group of productive people who have not yet lost their jobs in the private sector. Does it really seem possible that this sort of parasitism on the productive people of the United States really can create jobs that produce the things that people actually want? If socialized job creation is the only way out of this economic quagmire, as the politicians would have us believe, then why don't they socialize the entire economy? If it were indeed the case that the federal government can "create" productive jobs better than the private sector, then why don't they take over all aspects of the American economy, and we can all live happily ever-after in a brave, new, socialized America where everyone is enslaved, I mean employed, by the State.
And don't think for a moment that the politicians and bureaucrats are themselves going to help the productive people shoulder this onerous tax burden. On the contrary, politicians and bureaucrats do not actually pay taxes.
The heads of the government have simply chosen a complex and misleading accounting device to make it appear that he pays taxes in the same way as any other men making the same income. The UN's arrangement, whereby all its employees are exempt from any income taxation, is far more candid."
Hence, while Mr. Obama is fond of telling us that "we" are going to have to get out of this recession together, what he really means is that those of us who are employed in productive private lines of work in this country are going to have to hand over more and more of our hard-earned money to those people in this country who pay no taxes at all; namely, men like Mr. Obama himself and the rest of the fat, parasitic political and bureaucratic class that infests this country.
Some of the more shameless of the political class in America or their academic lackeys, have even tried to convince us that the trillions of dollars they are wasting in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to help us get out of this depression. They have been taking taxpayers'money and blowing it up in these two dreadfully poor countries year after year, and they would like for us to believe that this senseless destruction of wealth is going to make America richer. Often known as "Military Keynesians," this group is perhaps more aptly described as the "kill ourselves rich" crowd. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that neither you nor I are made better off when the federal government steals our money, hands it over to Lockheed Martin to purchase bombs, and then uses those bombs to blow up Pakistani civilians. The only people who benefit from this forceful expropriation of our money and indifferent murder are the merchants of death occupying lucrative posts at Lockheed, Blackwater and the Pentagon.
What the political and bureaucratic classes are actually accomplishing very well, however, is creating a veritable army of angry men whose lives have been destroyed by the federal government. Many have lost their jobs, thanks to the collapse of the largest artificial economic boom in American history – a boom that was directly caused by the actions of the federal government and the Fed. In addition, thanks to years of merciless and ceaseless money creation by the Fed, this army of men has found that their savings purchase fewer and fewer goods over time. This depreciation of the dollar will inexorably increase astronomically over the next few years as the massive amount of new money the Fed and treasury have already jointly printed, and are planning to print over the coming months and years, floods the system.
This army of angry men has very little to be optimistic about in the near future. At best, they might be able to keep their present jobs in the private sector – shouldering a heavier and heavier portion of the tax burden that funds the congress and president's wars and socialization schemes, while the value of their savings continues to erode into dust. Those who have lost their jobs might be permitted to work on Mr. Obama's "public works" projects, and thereby become virtual slaves to the whims of the political and bureaucratic classes. Many others will simply find it easier to start sucking at the state's teat in the form of unemployment insurance or food stamps, et cetera, and thereby lose all respect for themselves. One thing is certain for every member of this army of angry men, though; every single one of them will now find it very difficult, if not impossible, to carve out a living for himself, on his own terms, and without being at the complete mercy of politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers he has never even met. The age of the independent, responsible, and free American citizen is now dead.
The hour is fast approaching when each and every one of us will have to decide for ourselves whether we will try to fight this devastating government machine, or join it.
On its face, the idea that politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers could "save" the economy is laughable. These are people, after all, who live exclusively at our expense. That is, these are people whose entire livelihoods are dependent upon taking money away from productive people and spending it on themselves and their favorite wasteful projects. It's true that they do not all share the same ideas about how to spend the money they take from us. Some prefer to use it to blow up innocent people in foreign lands, while others simply want to take our hard-earned money without our consent and hand it over to other people. The bankers, on the other hand, merely content themselves with printing vast amounts of new money out of thin air that they either hand over to the Treasury Department, or gift to their other banker-buddies to lend out at a profit at our expense. Nevertheless, it should be crystal clear that these people do not actually produce anything themselves (except the bankers, who are very skilled counterfeiters of money). They take money from us through taxation and inflation, (and threaten us with severe punishments if we refuse to obey), and then spend every last penny of it – and more – on war, socialized boondoggles, and welfare. These are the people who would have us believe that they can "save" the economy? How exactly would they accomplish such a thing? More taxes, more idiotic socialized projects, more war, and more newly-printed green paper? Do these actions really seem likely to produce a vibrant and healthy economy, or do they seem more like the actions undertaken by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.?
They would also very much like for us to believe that they are the only people in the world capable of "creating jobs" in the United States. A more ridiculous idea would be hard to find. Again, these people are only in the business of taking money from productive people, and either wasting it entirely (e.g., war), keeping it themselves, or giving it to other people (e.g., entitlement programs, foreign aid, and paychecks for bureaucrats). As such, any actions undertaken by these people will necessarily depend for funding upon those who are forced to pay taxes; namely, the increasingly-dwindling group of productive people who have not yet lost their jobs in the private sector. Does it really seem possible that this sort of parasitism on the productive people of the United States really can create jobs that produce the things that people actually want? If socialized job creation is the only way out of this economic quagmire, as the politicians would have us believe, then why don't they socialize the entire economy? If it were indeed the case that the federal government can "create" productive jobs better than the private sector, then why don't they take over all aspects of the American economy, and we can all live happily ever-after in a brave, new, socialized America where everyone is enslaved, I mean employed, by the State.
And don't think for a moment that the politicians and bureaucrats are themselves going to help the productive people shoulder this onerous tax burden. On the contrary, politicians and bureaucrats do not actually pay taxes.
The heads of the government have simply chosen a complex and misleading accounting device to make it appear that he pays taxes in the same way as any other men making the same income. The UN's arrangement, whereby all its employees are exempt from any income taxation, is far more candid."
Hence, while Mr. Obama is fond of telling us that "we" are going to have to get out of this recession together, what he really means is that those of us who are employed in productive private lines of work in this country are going to have to hand over more and more of our hard-earned money to those people in this country who pay no taxes at all; namely, men like Mr. Obama himself and the rest of the fat, parasitic political and bureaucratic class that infests this country.
Some of the more shameless of the political class in America or their academic lackeys, have even tried to convince us that the trillions of dollars they are wasting in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to help us get out of this depression. They have been taking taxpayers'money and blowing it up in these two dreadfully poor countries year after year, and they would like for us to believe that this senseless destruction of wealth is going to make America richer. Often known as "Military Keynesians," this group is perhaps more aptly described as the "kill ourselves rich" crowd. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that neither you nor I are made better off when the federal government steals our money, hands it over to Lockheed Martin to purchase bombs, and then uses those bombs to blow up Pakistani civilians. The only people who benefit from this forceful expropriation of our money and indifferent murder are the merchants of death occupying lucrative posts at Lockheed, Blackwater and the Pentagon.
What the political and bureaucratic classes are actually accomplishing very well, however, is creating a veritable army of angry men whose lives have been destroyed by the federal government. Many have lost their jobs, thanks to the collapse of the largest artificial economic boom in American history – a boom that was directly caused by the actions of the federal government and the Fed. In addition, thanks to years of merciless and ceaseless money creation by the Fed, this army of men has found that their savings purchase fewer and fewer goods over time. This depreciation of the dollar will inexorably increase astronomically over the next few years as the massive amount of new money the Fed and treasury have already jointly printed, and are planning to print over the coming months and years, floods the system.
This army of angry men has very little to be optimistic about in the near future. At best, they might be able to keep their present jobs in the private sector – shouldering a heavier and heavier portion of the tax burden that funds the congress and president's wars and socialization schemes, while the value of their savings continues to erode into dust. Those who have lost their jobs might be permitted to work on Mr. Obama's "public works" projects, and thereby become virtual slaves to the whims of the political and bureaucratic classes. Many others will simply find it easier to start sucking at the state's teat in the form of unemployment insurance or food stamps, et cetera, and thereby lose all respect for themselves. One thing is certain for every member of this army of angry men, though; every single one of them will now find it very difficult, if not impossible, to carve out a living for himself, on his own terms, and without being at the complete mercy of politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers he has never even met. The age of the independent, responsible, and free American citizen is now dead.
The hour is fast approaching when each and every one of us will have to decide for ourselves whether we will try to fight this devastating government machine, or join it.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
دعاء افتتاح القمة العربية
اللهم ثبتنا على كراسينا ! وبارك لنا فيها ! واجعلها الوارث منا ! واجعل ثأرنا على شعبنا ! وانصرنا على من عارضنا ! ولا تجعل مصيبتنا في حُكمنا! ولا تجعل راحة الشعب أكبر همنا ولا مبلغ عِلمنا ! ولا الانقلاب العسكري مصيرنا! واجعل القصر الرئاسي هو دارنا ومستقرنا ! -------------------- اللهم إنا نسألك فترة ممتدة ! وهجمة مُرتدة ! والصبر على المعارضة ! والنصر على الشعب ! ونسألك الحُسن لكن لا نسألك الخاتمة أبداً ! اللهم ارزقنا معونة لا نسرق بعدها أبدا ! اللهم لا تفتح أبواب خزائننا لغيرنا ! اللهم أعطنا كلمة السر لحسابات الحكام السابقين لنا في بنوك سويسرا ! --------------------- اللهم وفق أمريكا لما فيه خيرنا ! اللهم اغفر لـ (جورج بوش) فإنه لا يعلم أننا لا نعلم ! اللهم وفقه لما فيه 99% من أصوات الناخبين ! اللهم نجهِ من أي إعصار أو كارثة طبيعية لأننا سنلوص مع شعوبنا من غيره ! اللهم عليك بشعبي، أما أعدائي فأنا سأتفاوض معهم ! --------------------- اللهم ارزقنا حب أمريكا ! وحب من يُحب أمريكا ! وحب ما يُقربنا إلى حب أمريكا ! ------------------ اللهم أمركني ولا تأفغني ! اللهم برطني ولا تصوملني ! اللهم فرنسني ولا تسودني ! اللهم ألمني ولا تؤلبني ! ------------------ اللهم أني أبرأ إليك من الاستعانة في حكم شعبي بأحد ! ولا حتى بصديق، ولا برأي الجمهور ! اللهم أني أعوذ بك من كرسي يُخلع ! ومن شعب لا يُقمع ! ومن صحيفة لا تُمنع ! ومن خطاب لا يُسمع ! ومن مواطن لا يُخدع ! وأعوذ بك من أن أجلس على الكرسي ثم أقوم أو أ ُقام عنه ! ------------------------- اللهم ثبتني على الكرسي تثبيتا ! و شتت المعارضة تشتيتا ! ولا تبق منهم شيطاناً ولا عفريتا ! اللهم آآآآآآآآمييييييييين
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Crisis For Dummies
The 2007–2008 financial crisis had its genesis in the United States housing markets, but it rapidly spread to other economies, first to the United Kingdom, but then almost everywhere else, including such unlikely spots as Iceland whose banking system collapsed.Because events in the United States triggered the crisis, this essay will concentrate on the US causes although they had their many counterparts elsewhere.
There are at least three long-standing background influences that contributed to the financial debacle that dominated the US economy in 2008:
1- For almost 100 years, the US government has not felt constrained to match its expenditure with its revenue. This policy was given intellectual justification by the writings of John Maynard Keynes who argued in the 1930s that, during periods of slow economic growth, active and purposeful government policies would allow the economy to spend its way out of recession. It was simply a matter of time before citizens aped the financial habits of their governments by living beyond their means.
2-The Federal Reserve System (the Fed — created in 1913) has accommodated government's policy of spending to excess by inflating the money supply and keeping interest rates artificially low. Today's dollar will buy what in 1913 would cost less than a nickel. This easy-money policy has not only led to inflation but has resulted in investments taking place that would not be justified had the money supply been constrained, and had interest rates more clearly reflected economic reality.
3- Since the 1960s, politicians parroting the suspect theories of Keynes have fed the public's naïve belief that government can provide ever-increasing living standards by means of its monetary and fiscal policies. Pulling a fiscal lever here and pushing a monetary button there meant that constraints on spending were old fashioned, and living standards would forever improve. The limitations imposed by the laws of economics had been repealed if you voted for politicians who promised to provide you with something for nothing. Fiscal prudence was simply a capitalist lie.
It is against this long term, more philosophic backdrop, that the following, more immediate issues, assumed greater importance.
4- Households collectively made little attempt to save for the future. The United States, in particular, borrowed from China, Japan, and Middle Eastern countries to finance its spending addictions. Financial responsibility was considered an old-fashioned, or even an irrelevant, virtue, and people were led to believe that government could, by waving its magic wand, provide improved housing without the pain of saving or foregoing immediate consumption.
5- The acquisition of a house was viewed by many buyers not so much as having somewhere to live but as a painless way to make money. House prices, they naively believed, would always continue to increase in value while the relative burden of mortgages would continue to fall. Not only that, but as house values increased, a house could be used as collateral for a further loan. The financial equivalent of turning sea water into gold had been created. So long as house prices increased, borrowers were in financial heaven. When house prices fell, the earth opened up under the feet of lenders.
6- Government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidized mortgages for people who, under more-prudent rules of borrowing, would never have qualified for a loan from a conservative banking institution. Congressman Barney Frank in 2003 stated in a moment of candor, "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing." Well he certainly did, at the same time accepting with gratitude campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
7- The egalitarian policies of government through such legislation as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 "persuaded" lenders, Mafioso style, to lend to low-income borrowers, against their better judgment. Government lawyers made it clear that the consequences of failing to meet politically imposed targets and quotas could be dire.
8- It was a matter of time before a substantial minority of borrowers could not or would not service their mortgages. Partly because astute people predicted this, well-known names in the financial world began to package, or sponsor, mortgage and other debts such as credit-card balances into what were called structured-investment vehicles (SIV), dubbed "financial weapons of mass destruction" by Warren Buffet. So complicated were the terms contained in such instruments that many legal minds and the credit-rating agencies were baffled as to exactly what they meant and where the ultimate risk lay. Banks and others could benefit by lending to people who could not afford to pay interest, far less capital, provided they were able to sell the SIVs to gullible investors. Money managers naively bought such investments for pension funds, money market funds, and (even more surprisingly) for their firms' own accounts. This was the primrose path to unlimited housing ownership, with no painful cash deposit, and no adverse consequences to the first lenders.
9- So long as (a) the value of housing increased, (b) borrowers paid on time, and (c) confidence remained in the credibility of SIVs, everything was hunky-dory. Unfortunately, all three cratered about the same time; house values stagnated or fell as supply exceeded demand; when values stuttered, so did borrowers repayments, and confidence plunged. Borrowers, having promised to pay and having offered security for their promises, were failing to pay because their security had declined in value. They repudiated their debts, and the burden fell on hapless financial institutions. Populist politicians rarely blamed the borrowers, because there are so many of them and they vote; instead they blamed greedy capitalists, speculators, short sellers, anyone except the debtors, and the imprudent economic policies of the US government.
10- As events began to unravel in mid-2008, well-established firms like Lehman Brothers, went to the wall. Others like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were sold at knockdown prices. Yet others, like insurance giant AIG, were effectively nationalized.Meanwhile, the stock-market value of banks and other financial institutions took a nosedive. For example, Citibank stock price fell by 79% between October 2008 and October 2009. The broader stock-market indices like the Dow Jones also plummeted by around 40%. The US government had no systematic policy, and rules were made up as more and more bad news emerged, especially about jobs. Citibank had a labor force of 375,000 in 2007; in November 2008, it was announced that 53,000 jobs would go by the first quarter of 2009. Senior government officials were like shipwrecked sailors (and were spending money like drunken sailors) paddling like mad but with little idea of where they were going, or why. The only consistent rule was that something had to be done, and the US government must be the action party.
It is difficult not to recall the words of Herbert Spencer: "The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools."
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a Ponzi scheme writ large. A Ponzi scheme, or chain letter, initially succeeds but eventually collapses, just as imprudent loans may at first succeed in their objectives but eventually the laws of economics come into play and expose the futility of the whole exercise. A pyramid scheme is always unsustainable for the simple reason that it is based on faulty principles and built on flawed foundations. Until too late, no one in authority (regulators, risk managers, senior bank executives, credit-rating agencies, investment analysts) asked the key question, namely, how on earth was it possible in the long term to make profits by lending money to people whose chances of paying it back were practically nil?The issue was simply swept under the carpet because loans to deadbeats provided a better short-term return than did lower-risk debt instruments.
In summary, the essence of the subprime crisis is that money was lent (often through the agency of questionable mortgage brokers) at very low interest rates (courtesy of the Fed) to hundreds of thousands of people (all they needed was a credit score and a pulse) who could not afford to pay it back; and it was backed by collateral (a house) that was not properly valued.
Such assets, accurately described as "liar loans," were then packaged into opaque securities, known as structured-investment vehicles (sponsored but not guaranteed by a respected and well-known name), which very few people understood. They were sold on to pension funds, banks, and others whose gullible investment managers also did not understand them and failed to carry out the rigorous analysis that their clients had a right to to expect.
Government encouraged all of this by supporting affordable housing (which was politically correct) and accusing banks of redlining (failing to lend to poor and black people in the same proportion as they lent to the rich and white). When the borrower, already maxed out on his credit cards, predictably failed to make payments, the scale of the problems eventually became apparent to somnolent regulators and financial institutions. Confidence and trust evaporated, because no one knew which institutions held suspect securities, how much the losses were, and who was ultimately safe. A financial system built on debt and excessive leverage was a financial system built on sand.
The errors and fallacies that weave and surround this awful catalog of errors could have largely been avoided by paying attention to a single sentence. written by Henry Hazlitt over 60 years ago:
"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the long effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups"
There are at least three long-standing background influences that contributed to the financial debacle that dominated the US economy in 2008:
1- For almost 100 years, the US government has not felt constrained to match its expenditure with its revenue. This policy was given intellectual justification by the writings of John Maynard Keynes who argued in the 1930s that, during periods of slow economic growth, active and purposeful government policies would allow the economy to spend its way out of recession. It was simply a matter of time before citizens aped the financial habits of their governments by living beyond their means.
2-The Federal Reserve System (the Fed — created in 1913) has accommodated government's policy of spending to excess by inflating the money supply and keeping interest rates artificially low. Today's dollar will buy what in 1913 would cost less than a nickel. This easy-money policy has not only led to inflation but has resulted in investments taking place that would not be justified had the money supply been constrained, and had interest rates more clearly reflected economic reality.
3- Since the 1960s, politicians parroting the suspect theories of Keynes have fed the public's naïve belief that government can provide ever-increasing living standards by means of its monetary and fiscal policies. Pulling a fiscal lever here and pushing a monetary button there meant that constraints on spending were old fashioned, and living standards would forever improve. The limitations imposed by the laws of economics had been repealed if you voted for politicians who promised to provide you with something for nothing. Fiscal prudence was simply a capitalist lie.
It is against this long term, more philosophic backdrop, that the following, more immediate issues, assumed greater importance.
4- Households collectively made little attempt to save for the future. The United States, in particular, borrowed from China, Japan, and Middle Eastern countries to finance its spending addictions. Financial responsibility was considered an old-fashioned, or even an irrelevant, virtue, and people were led to believe that government could, by waving its magic wand, provide improved housing without the pain of saving or foregoing immediate consumption.
5- The acquisition of a house was viewed by many buyers not so much as having somewhere to live but as a painless way to make money. House prices, they naively believed, would always continue to increase in value while the relative burden of mortgages would continue to fall. Not only that, but as house values increased, a house could be used as collateral for a further loan. The financial equivalent of turning sea water into gold had been created. So long as house prices increased, borrowers were in financial heaven. When house prices fell, the earth opened up under the feet of lenders.
6- Government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidized mortgages for people who, under more-prudent rules of borrowing, would never have qualified for a loan from a conservative banking institution. Congressman Barney Frank in 2003 stated in a moment of candor, "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing." Well he certainly did, at the same time accepting with gratitude campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
7- The egalitarian policies of government through such legislation as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 "persuaded" lenders, Mafioso style, to lend to low-income borrowers, against their better judgment. Government lawyers made it clear that the consequences of failing to meet politically imposed targets and quotas could be dire.
8- It was a matter of time before a substantial minority of borrowers could not or would not service their mortgages. Partly because astute people predicted this, well-known names in the financial world began to package, or sponsor, mortgage and other debts such as credit-card balances into what were called structured-investment vehicles (SIV), dubbed "financial weapons of mass destruction" by Warren Buffet. So complicated were the terms contained in such instruments that many legal minds and the credit-rating agencies were baffled as to exactly what they meant and where the ultimate risk lay. Banks and others could benefit by lending to people who could not afford to pay interest, far less capital, provided they were able to sell the SIVs to gullible investors. Money managers naively bought such investments for pension funds, money market funds, and (even more surprisingly) for their firms' own accounts. This was the primrose path to unlimited housing ownership, with no painful cash deposit, and no adverse consequences to the first lenders.
9- So long as (a) the value of housing increased, (b) borrowers paid on time, and (c) confidence remained in the credibility of SIVs, everything was hunky-dory. Unfortunately, all three cratered about the same time; house values stagnated or fell as supply exceeded demand; when values stuttered, so did borrowers repayments, and confidence plunged. Borrowers, having promised to pay and having offered security for their promises, were failing to pay because their security had declined in value. They repudiated their debts, and the burden fell on hapless financial institutions. Populist politicians rarely blamed the borrowers, because there are so many of them and they vote; instead they blamed greedy capitalists, speculators, short sellers, anyone except the debtors, and the imprudent economic policies of the US government.
10- As events began to unravel in mid-2008, well-established firms like Lehman Brothers, went to the wall. Others like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were sold at knockdown prices. Yet others, like insurance giant AIG, were effectively nationalized.Meanwhile, the stock-market value of banks and other financial institutions took a nosedive. For example, Citibank stock price fell by 79% between October 2008 and October 2009. The broader stock-market indices like the Dow Jones also plummeted by around 40%. The US government had no systematic policy, and rules were made up as more and more bad news emerged, especially about jobs. Citibank had a labor force of 375,000 in 2007; in November 2008, it was announced that 53,000 jobs would go by the first quarter of 2009. Senior government officials were like shipwrecked sailors (and were spending money like drunken sailors) paddling like mad but with little idea of where they were going, or why. The only consistent rule was that something had to be done, and the US government must be the action party.
It is difficult not to recall the words of Herbert Spencer: "The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools."
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a Ponzi scheme writ large. A Ponzi scheme, or chain letter, initially succeeds but eventually collapses, just as imprudent loans may at first succeed in their objectives but eventually the laws of economics come into play and expose the futility of the whole exercise. A pyramid scheme is always unsustainable for the simple reason that it is based on faulty principles and built on flawed foundations. Until too late, no one in authority (regulators, risk managers, senior bank executives, credit-rating agencies, investment analysts) asked the key question, namely, how on earth was it possible in the long term to make profits by lending money to people whose chances of paying it back were practically nil?The issue was simply swept under the carpet because loans to deadbeats provided a better short-term return than did lower-risk debt instruments.
In summary, the essence of the subprime crisis is that money was lent (often through the agency of questionable mortgage brokers) at very low interest rates (courtesy of the Fed) to hundreds of thousands of people (all they needed was a credit score and a pulse) who could not afford to pay it back; and it was backed by collateral (a house) that was not properly valued.
Such assets, accurately described as "liar loans," were then packaged into opaque securities, known as structured-investment vehicles (sponsored but not guaranteed by a respected and well-known name), which very few people understood. They were sold on to pension funds, banks, and others whose gullible investment managers also did not understand them and failed to carry out the rigorous analysis that their clients had a right to to expect.
Government encouraged all of this by supporting affordable housing (which was politically correct) and accusing banks of redlining (failing to lend to poor and black people in the same proportion as they lent to the rich and white). When the borrower, already maxed out on his credit cards, predictably failed to make payments, the scale of the problems eventually became apparent to somnolent regulators and financial institutions. Confidence and trust evaporated, because no one knew which institutions held suspect securities, how much the losses were, and who was ultimately safe. A financial system built on debt and excessive leverage was a financial system built on sand.
The errors and fallacies that weave and surround this awful catalog of errors could have largely been avoided by paying attention to a single sentence. written by Henry Hazlitt over 60 years ago:
"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the long effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups"
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