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Jan 3, 2011

Joe Webb comments on: Obama is a "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"

 

Fromjoe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com>

Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 10:47 PM
 


Of course, Hedges is a left-liberal himself.  What he is talking about is the death of folks like himself and  Amy "Esther" spy/whore  for Israel  Goodman.   This is funny. "Racist garbage" is the way the world works.  Now Hedges may have concluded that we are all garbage, I guess.  And he and the Left are the only non-garbage.  He will end his days in a dumpster, thrown there by mexers and blacks after they have given him a taste of Meaning....Terror.

His book, about which I think I read a review a while back, War is What Gives us Meaning, or some such.  It demeans those who find war meaningful.  It pathologizes war.  Well, you can pathologize anything from your own demented or eccentric view of things.

War in fact is Good.  It is why you and I are  are here today.  Somebody fought and killed and died so that we could be here. Your genes have been traveling for millions of years and find their current expression in you and your racial cohorts. All the pacifists shit on the graves of their ancestors who fought and died for them.  Every civilization has fought for its birth , and survival.  Just as parents fight for their children, soldiers fight for their tribe or country.  To pathologize this is the mark of a coward, pacifist, fool, and sissy.  not worth the money it took to raise them to adulthood.

War gives us meaning because it represents not only our willingness to sacrifice , but to Feel and experience  Loyalty, Honor, and Transcendence.  Transcendence is not metaphysical, it is concrete.  My people is more valuable than my particular life.  This is love, this is Expansion and Affirmation.  The liberal dies for nothing, except maybe some Abstraction like Equality, which is absurd on its face.  Liberals die for people who hate them, if they have not already cut and run.  After all the Liberal believes in the Individual first.  We racialists, Jews, Whites and almost everybody on the planet, die for Our People.  The liberal will never understand this.  He is alone. He thinks himself a world citizen, but no one will love him.  well, maybe his mother.  His father is likely to have shoved him aside.

Our People's way of life needs no defence.  If someone wants to change it without our consent, they are in danger of having their individual and group writ cancelled.  The lefties and  liberals are trying to kill Western Civilization and the White Race and for that they will pay the ultimate penalty.

Hedges is probably a cypto name for a Jew. Now, all of that said, many wars are unjustified per all of  the above.    The only war now arguably justifiable is the war against the Jews, blacks and browns, liberals and assorted world citizens who threaten our White existence.    
--- Joe Webb

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[Thanks to Harry Pariser – editorial@savethemanatee.com]

The compromise tax-cut deal that President Obama signed into law on Friday has angered many of his supporters. In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges argues that the failure of President Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In the book, Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class — the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party — have become corrupt.
            [- Harry]
 
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Chris Hedges: Obama is a "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"
Dec 20, 2010
 
The compromise tax-cut deal that President Obama signed into law on Friday has angered many of his supporters. In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges argues that the failure of President Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In the book, Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama signed the controversial $858 billion tax-cut legislation into law Friday. At least a quarter of the tax savings under the deal will go to the wealthiest one percent of the population. The only group that will see its taxes increase are the nation's lowest-paid workers.

In the wake of the tax deal, the Washington Post reports the White House is, quote, "moving quickly to mend its strained relationship with the Democratic base, reassuring liberal groups, black leaders and labor union officials who opposed the tax compromise that Obama has not abandoned them." The Post goes on to say, quote, "Liberal groups were part of [the] broad coalition that helped elect Obama in 2008, and activists had high hopes [that] he would govern as a left-of-center president. But tensions with the White House increased as many liberals complained Obama took a more centrist view on issues," unquote.

Well, my next guest argues the failure of Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In his new book, journalist and author Chris Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt.

Chris Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 as part of a team covering the issue of global terror. He's author of a number of books; his latest, Death of the Liberal Class. On Thursday, Chris Hedges was one of the more than 130 people, mainly war veterans, arrested outside the White House in an antiwar protest led by the group Veterans for Peace.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened? It hardly got any coverage in the corporate media.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, well, that's not much of a surprise, at this point. I think we've seen a kind of a withering of corporate media, including my own paper, the New York Times. As advertising rates decline and as circulation drops, they become even more craven in their service of the power elite and reportage that in no way offends the structures of power. So, you know, events like that one are nonentities for mainstream news organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by the "death of the liberal class"?

CHRIS HEDGES: The collapse of the pillar, the primary pillars of the liberal establishment, those liberal institutions—the press, labor, public education and, in particular universities, culture, liberal religious institutions and the Democratic Party—that have been under assault.

And I speak a lot about World War I and the rise of the Committee for Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was the first system of modern mass propaganda, very closely studied by the Nazis, used to sell an unpopular war to an American public, but also used to crush populist, radical, progressive anarchist, Socialist, Communist movements that had frightened the power elite on the eve of World War I. And they employed for the first time the techniques of mass crowd psychology studied by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud. They understood that people were moved or manipulated not by fact or reason, but by what Walter Lippmann calls the "manufacturing of consent" in his 1922 book Public Opinion. And we've never recovered ever since.

So the assault and destruction of these populist or radical movements, which kept liberal institutions honest, and then the purges within liberal institutions, especially the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s. And many people who were expelled from these institutions were no way Communist, figures like I.F. Stone, arguably our greatest journalist of the 20th century, couldn't even get a job at The Nation magazine and ends up a pariah. He's not alone—thousands and thousands of people. So that with the rise of neoliberalism and the corporate state under Clinton, these—we lost the radical movements, and we lost the liberal institutions that normally make possible incremental or piecemeal reform within the formal mechanisms of power.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened within the universities.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, there was—of course, one of the most egregious examples occurred here in New York City when Rockefeller went after City University. What they did is they destroyed the capacity for people outside the power elite to get great education. City University at one time was one of the great universities in the country and educated, you know, a huge swath of mostly first-generation immigrants. The corporatization of universities is far advanced now. You have a withering of the humanities, destruction of philosophy departments. Departments must raise not only their own research and grant money, but often their own salaries. Well, you know, who's going to pay for that?

And so, what we've turned our universities into are essentially vocational schools. If you go to a school like Princeton, then you will become a systems manager and go to Goldman Sachs. If you go to an inner-city dysfunctional public school in a place like Camden, you are trained vocationally to stock shelves in Walmart. It's a kind of solidification of a very pernicious class system, and one that doesn't train students anymore to think but to fill slots.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, you were a longtime correspondent for the New York Times. For two decades you worked there. You were one of the premier war correspondents. You wrote the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. You won the Pulitzer Prize about eight years ago. You talk in Death of the Liberal Class about your experience at the Times. Why don't you go through it for us in detail and what you think it indicates?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about those figures, like Sydney Schanberg and others, who were expelled from these liberal institutions—Richard Goldstone, who wrote the Goldstone Report on the 22-day Israeli assault on Gaza, would be another example—because there are clear parameters within these institutions that you don't cross. The perfect example would be the buildup to the Iraq war. Here, the liberal, so-called self-identified liberal class—figures like David Remnick at The New Yorker; Bill Keller, who was a columnist at the New York Times, now the executive editor; George Packer; on and on, even people like Frank Rich, people forget—all backed the war. And they did it as sort of reluctant hawks. Probably the poster child for this was Michael Ignatieff of the Carr Center, at Harvard, for Human Rights, who's now the head of the Liberal Party in Canada.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, that reluctance makes them the most convincing.

CHRIS HEDGES: And it—yeah, of course it does, because it gives a kind of moral veneer to a crime. It's heartfelt. "We don't like war. We all opposed the Vietnam War." This is almost verbatim Ignatieff's argument. And "But it's something that has to be done. We have to face the hard, bitter truth of world politics and recognize that we are a force for good." Samantha Power does this, in essence, in her book on genocide. It's the idea that the empire is sort of used to—it can abrogate for itself the right to use force to impose virtues. It's an utter tautology and absurdity to those of us who have been at war. But it works. And the function of the liberal class and why it is traditionally tolerated by the power elite is because it disarms movements that should have stood up on the eve of the Iraq war and fought back.

And, of course, my own clash with the New York Times occurred over the war after I gave a commencement address, which you played on Democracy Now!, at Rockford College, my first and last invitation to give a commencement address. And if I had gotten up and said, "America is a great democracy that goes abroad to liberate and provide freedom and impose—or, you know, give its sort of virtues of Western civilization to the lesser people of the Middle East," well, nobody would have said anything. Indeed, John Burns was quite public in his support for the war. But to challenge the intentions and the virtues of the power elite, that's the line that the liberal class—if you cross that line, which, of course, Goldstone did in his report—Schanberg did it when he started writing about real estate developers who were driving out low-income and medium-income New Yorkers from Manhattan and the homeless on the streets—then you're out. Then you are pushed out of the institution.

So, oftentimes there are good people within these institutions, but if they hold fast to these moral imperatives, inevitably they are shunted aside. And the problem is, with the rise of the corporate state and power systems, especially financial systems, that by any definition or any criteria are criminal, you have liberal institutions like the New York Times paying deference to these institutions, when in fact they should be challenging them.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, if you had given a speech for the war at Rockford College, you hardly would have been reprimanded. But just for a moment, let's go back in time. We'll link to it at democracynow.org, this amazing moment, the speech that you gave, that you did not actually think was going to be that controversial.

CHRIS HEDGES: No.

AMY GOODMAN: After all, Rockford College was Jane Addams' college.

CHRIS HEDGES: That's all I knew about it. I thought they were just pacifist Socialists.

AMY GOODMAN: When the police were escorting you out, why don't you just quickly explain what happened, and then what the Times did about this?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it was—I had my mike cut. And you can watch it on YouTube or on—link it to democracynow.org. And I was booed, and people stood up and started singing "God Bless America" and jeering and—

AMY GOODMAN: And you were saying?

CHRIS HEDGES: I was talking about the consequences of the war. I spent seven years in the Middle East, months of my life in Iraq. I speak Arabic. This wasn't an opinion. This was based on a tremendous amount of time and energy in an area of the world I knew very well. And then I was finally escorted—they closed all the roads out of the campus, and the security escorted me out before the awarding of diplomas, because they didn't want the students to come in close proximity. I had two young men try and climb up on the stage at the end and push me off the podium. And what happened was the trash talk. Fox and all these people got a hold of the home videos and ran it in these sort of endless loops. So I was lynched in the same way they lynched, you know, figures like my friend Jeremiah Wright. And—

AMY GOODMAN: You almost were a minister.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, I almost was. I finished but wasn't ordained. And the Times had to respond. So they responded by giving me a formal written reprimand, and were Guild—they were Guild, which means that the next time I spoke out against the war, the next time I violated that warning, I would be fired. And that's when I left the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: You were actually quite muted in criticism of the government when you were at the New York Times and you were being interviewed, like by us.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah. The Times wouldn't consider it muted. Maybe for Democracy Now! listeners, it was muted. But yeah, the stance was—and I knew what I was doing. I had been there 15 years. It was a kind of career suicide. But I felt so strongly that this was a mistake, and there were so few of us that had that kind of experience, in particular, in the Arab world, that I had a kind of duty to speak out.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Chris Hedges. His new book is called Death of the Liberal Class. The incoming head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, New York Congressmember Peter King, says he's going to hold hearings on what he calls the radicalization of American Muslims. What is your response to this?

CHRIS HEDGES: It's racist. It's racist garbage. And I speak to Muslim groups all over the country, and they're terrified. And it's—in the stories that I hear anecdotally of every time they fly, constant intrusions by state security into matters of privacy, when these people have done nothing wrong. They are being demonized, especially by the right wing, for the failings of the—as the state continues to unravel and collapse, they are being picked out as scapegoats. And should we suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, I'm very, very frightened for what's going to happen to American Muslims, who are hardly radical. Every time I go to these groups, they fall all—the most radical person in the room is myself, or they fall all over themselves to talk about American democracy and how great it is and how they are so proud to be citizens. It's heartbreaking to watch.

I mean, I spoke at the Jerusalem Fund, and in the middle of the talk—you know, I can get away with it, because I'm not Muslim. The director got up and said, "You know, this is his own opinion. We totally disassociate. We have nothing to do with his stance." The fear—and legitimate fear—that has been driven by Neanderthals like this guy and others by demonizing American Muslims is really deeply frightening.

AMY GOODMAN: You were being arrested on Thursday in the snow in Washington, D.C. with over 130 others. Among them, who? Dan Ellsberg—

CHRIS HEDGES: Right.

AMY GOODMAN:—Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Ray McGovern, who was the briefer for George H.W. Bush for years, worked at the Central Intelligence Agency; many veterans. We played some clips last week, at the same time that this tax bill was passed, which will increase taxes on the working poor and decrease, of course, at the highest level, the wealthiest Americans. Link the war with—spending on the war with what we're spending on people at home and dealing with poverty here.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, this was—became a very prominent theme that Martin Luther King beat home, especially in the last years of his life during the Vietnam War, that—especially because we're going into debt. I mean, we're building a kind of debt peonage system, which is used then as an excuse to go after wage earners, to go after systems like Social Security. I mean, one of the most pernicious things that Obama did in this tax bill was reduce contributions to Social Security, because of course that's next on the target, as well as raise the deficit by $900—$700 and $900 billion.

And what's terrifying about movements like the Tea Party is that they provide a kind of emotional consistency. And, of course, that undercurrent of racism towards undocumented workers, towards Muslims, is very much a part of the language of that pernicious right wing. But it embraces all things military, as if somehow the military is not part of government. It's an irrational political policy. You know, nobody—they want to get government off their backs, but nobody—everybody wants to extend unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and of course not touch the big—you know, the force that is draining the—hollowing the country out from the inside, which is the military-industrial complex—50 percent of all discretionary spending. And so, as these deficits—we've now racked up the largest deficits in human history, and as these deficits are ratcheted upwards, and there is an inability to question the self-destructive quality of the armament industry, then it's taken out on the backs of the working class—and our working class is already in tremendous financial straits—and in the middle class.

AMY GOODMAN: The incoming House Banking Committee chair, Spencer Bachus, said, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that's pretty much been the policy since Bill Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama?

CHRIS HEDGES: A disaster. A poster child for the bankruptcy of the liberal class. Somebody who, like Clinton, is a self-identified liberal, who speaks in the traditional language of liberalism but has made war against the core values of liberalism, which is a concern for those people outside the narrow power elite. And the tragedy, if tragedy is the right word, is that Obama, who made this Faustian bargain with corporate interests in order to gain power, has now been crumpled up and thrown away by these interests. They don't need him anymore. He functioned as a brand after the disastrous eight years of George Bush.

And what we are watching is an even more craven attempt on the part of the White House to cater to the forces that are literally destroying the United States, have reconfigured, are reconfiguring this country into a form of neofeudalism. And all of the traditional—the pillars of the liberal establishment, that once provided some kind of protection and, more importantly, a kind of safety valve, a mechanism by which legitimate grievances and injustices in this country could be addressed, have shut tight. They no longer work. And so, we are getting these terrifying, proto-fascist movements that are leaping up around the fringes of American society and have as their anger not only a rage against government, but a rage against liberals, as well. And I would say that rage is not misplaced.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, you began your speech outside in the snow, outside the gates of the White House, by saying, "Hope, from now on, will look like this."

CHRIS HEDGES: That's right. All we have left are acts of physical resistance. Of course, I'm deeply nonviolent. And if we don't get out, then we're finished. To trust in the normal mechanisms of power and those normal liberal institutions that once—and Democracy Now!, of course, is an exception to this—but, you know, once gave voice and a place to working men in this country is to be very na?ve and essentially acquiesce to our own bondage.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, worked for the New York Times for more than two decades. His latest book is Death of the Liberal Class.

______________________

Guest:

Chris Hedges, fellow at the Nation Institute. He is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of a number of books; his latest is called Death of the Liberal Class.

 
 
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-- It is not illegal to expose an illegal war. Support Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks !!
 
-- An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. - George Bernard Shaw
 
-- It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class — except congress.
- Mark Twain
 
-- 30 million christianist fundamentalists (probably the largest voting bloc in the world) voted for bush, war and occupation in 2004, about as far away from a Christian approach to other people as it is possible to get. As Chris Hedges says, "The gospels are the one book the [christianist] fundamentalists know nothing about."
 
— The Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation. We Israelis enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities ... we established an apartheid regime.
- Michael Ben-Yair, Israeli attorney general in the1990s, quoted in The Guardian (U.K.), April 11, 2002
 
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Son of Hitler's deputy faces accusations of sexual assault - Europe, World - The Independent

 

 

Son of Hitler's deputy faces accusations of sexual assault

By Tony Patterson in Berlin

Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Martin Bormann Jnr as a priest in 1958

Getty Images

Martin Bormann Jnr as a priest in 1958

The eldest son of Adolf Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann, was yesterday accused of subjecting a former pupil at an Austrian Catholic boarding school to violent and protracted sexual abuse during his time there working as a priest and schoolmaster, more than 50 years ago.

Martin Bormann Jnr, the 80-year-old son of one of the Nazi leader's most important deputies, is renowned in Germany and Austria for his attempts to atone for his father's crimes. He has been a Catholic missionary, priest and a speaker against the Holocaust in schools.

Yesterday, however, the son of one Hitler's closest advisers faced serious allegations that he had assaulted pupils both violently and sexually while employed as a schoolmaster at an elite boarding school at the Hearts of Jesus monastery in Salzburg during the 1960s. Bormann is reported to have denied knowledge of the events.

The accusations, which were the latest in a flood of sex-abuse allegations against the Catholic church which began surfacing in Germany and Austria early last year, were made by a 63-year-old former pupil at the monastery school, named only as Victor M.

He told Austria's Profil magazine that when he was a 12-year-old pupil, Mr Bormann, who was a 30-year-old priest at the time, had repeatedly raped him and had warned him that informing others of his experiences, even his own mother, would be useless because "nobody will believe you". Three other pupils at the school told the magazine that Mr Bormann had also beaten boys so badly that they ended up covered in blood.

In one case, it was claimed, a boy was beaten unconscious. Victor M's lawyer told Profil that her client's life had been "ruined" by his school experiences and that he had had to undergo protracted psychiatric treatment as a result.

Mr Bormann spent his childhood and adolescence largely in the company of the Nazi bigwigs who were contemporaries of his father, who was once thought of as a future Nazi leader himself.

His first confrontation with the brutality of the Third Reich came as a child when he saw a chair – belonging to the Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler – which was made out of human bones. Mr Bormann's father, who was killed by shellfire outside Hitler's Berlin bunker, was tried in absentia at Nuremberg after the war and sentenced to death, due to a lack of physical evidence about his demise.

Mr Bormann was shocked by the scale of the Nazis' crimes after the war and decided to become a Catholic priest. He served as a missionary in the Congo and wrote an autobiography in an attempt to come to terms with his Nazi past.

Later he left the priesthood in order to marry a nun who nursed him after he suffered a near-fatal injury in 1969. However, he continued to visit schools and speak out against the crimes of the Holocaust. He also met with survivors in Israel. He currently lives in Germany with his wife.

Profil magazine visited him at an undisclosed address and asked him to respond to the accusations of sexual abuse. According to the magazine, Mr Bormann said that that he did not remember the alleged incidents. Shown a photograph of his alleged victim, Victor M, aged 12, Mr Bormann insisted that it was a picture of a girl. Victor M told the magazine that all he expected was an apology.




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Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

An antisemite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an antisemite.--Michael Santomauro

Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish. Actually, it is safe to say that virtually every mainstream publication or or other type of media organ is "nothing more than a screen to present chosen views." The great battle over the last century has been a battle for the mind of the Western peoples, i.e., non-Jewish Euros. The chosen won it by acquiring control over essentially the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media of every type, and using that control to infuse and disseminate their message, agenda and worldview, their way of thinking, or rather the way they want us to think. Since at least the 1960s this campaign has been effectively complete. Since then they have shaped and controlled the minds of all but a seeming few of us in varying degree with almost no opposition or competition from any alternative worldview. So now most of us are mentally trapped in the box the chosen have made for us, which we have lived in all our lives. Only a few have managed to avoid it or escape it, or to even sometimes see outside of it, and so actually "think outside of the (Jewish) box." --Michael Santomauro

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Fwd: Joe Webb: let's get straight on monetization, the Fed , how banks work, and so on

 


From: joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com>
Date: January 3, 2011 9:01:59 PM EST
To: michael santomauro <reporternotebook@Gmail.com>


Hi Mike, the Jeff Gates piece you sent out prompted me to write the below.  JOe

--- On Mon, 1/3/11, joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com>
Subject: [CMS] let's get straight on monetization, the Fed , how banks work, and so on
To: CMS-MembersList@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, January 3, 2011, 5:45 PM

 


Every day we get messages, usually wrong I think, about the above. I would call especially on John Gardner to step in here.

First, monetization, per Wikipedia, is simply a process of making some tangible object ...money. Thus sea-shells, precious metals, paper notes, and IOUs and loans and other business contracts (debts or assets) can be passed around in exchange relationships.

The first thing I would recommend is that folks read the Wikipedia definition of money, money supply, and fractional banking.

Since so many folks are convinced that the Fed is a conspiracy of jokers, jews, capitalist pigs in general, illuminati and freemasons, it is really high time to try to get straight on the Fed and fractional reserve banking.

Here is my sense of things, and I do not pretend to understand money completely. Money is a kind of mystery, for those who can perceive that they do not know enough of x.

First, there are not enough precious metals to accomodate population/demand growth for money. If the amount of precious metals remains at a limited quantity, then more pressure for more money means that precious metals' prices inflate. Is this a source of bottlenecking an economy? Probably.

Second, fractional banking, the practice of creating money out of "thin air" as so many critics claim, by loaning out, say 10 times what the bank actually has in terms of deposits and other assets, has a very long history of success and occasional failures. I read that in the last 100 years or so, capitalism has created economic wealth in the West in the area of ten times the per capita wealth of a hundred years ago. One of the reasons for this spectacular achievement is credit...that is, what banks do when they lend "money." Without credit, projects do not get started. It is that simple.

Not all projects are successful, and when they fail, the bank is left holding the bag, or non-bag, of disappeared money. That money went up to money heaven, never to return. When projects succeed, the economy is enhanced, and the thin-air money turns into concrete goods and services.

No economy runs without credit and credit creation. No economy runs without banks. Now, a bank can be held privately or publicly. I understand that North Dakota has the only State bank in the U.S. It does very well, and possibly is a model for more socially responsible and wealth spreading. (Is there anything wrong with spreading the wealth particularly when one of the choke-points in our economy is the poor performance of consumer spending, 70% of the economy? When ordinary folks don't have much dough, they cannot spend. The middle class has been spending less and less for the last 20 years...consumer spending, WSJ a few weeks ago.)

The Fed is no different than banks in creating money out of "thin air". The Fed does so by the purchase of treasury bonds. Even the WSJ agrees that quantitative easing (QE) by the Fed has helped the economy. The Fed buys the bonds, gives the gov't fresh new greenbacks and the gov't spends and gets more dough out into folks's hands. Then, the Fed holds debt, and, if I understand this correctly, that is tacked onto the Federal deficit.

So, yes, more national debt is accumulated, which is not good, but the economy is supposed to start cooking again so that the national debt can be paid down thru taxes, reduced spending by gov't, inflation, and, most importantly, economic growth which is the only thing that can generate more revenue ultimately.

So, there is no free money here. An economy within a country is not like home economics because it is 1, huge, 2, can expand and contract its money supply, 3, does not have to pay down its debt in bad times. On the other hand, too much debt begins to make everybody nervous, as it should, especially potential lenders (see Europe's sovereign debt crisis). Ultimately national debt must be paid down. The consensus of economists is that no more than maybe around one quarter of a country's GDP should consist of debt. (Today, the U.S. is approaching 100% of its GDP and Japan is at about 200% of its GDP.)

At the macro level, household economics is similar to sovereign debt. If you don't look like you can pay back your loans, you either don't get more loans, or you pay a large risk premium. If you are tied down by debt payments, you cannot invest in productive projects, let alone pay for bloated pensions and the like that are based on politics rather than economics. (The days of the pols getting rich may be over.)

So, assuming I got this correct, fractional banking at the micro level is like the Federal Reserve Bank. What is different is that the Fed is huge and can pretty much do what it wants, until of course, the whole economy is going over a cliff. The point is that the Fed is supposed to prevent it going over a cliff thru adjustment of the money supply.

The other major economics 101 feature with regard to the role of the Federal gov't is trying to regulate the economy, is its fiscal policy. All that means is how and how much it spends our tax dollars. Economists argue whether fiscal measures are more or less important than the money supply.

Clearly, spending tax money and public debt money on things that do not work, like useless wars for Israel, extravagant pensions and welfare payments, education boondoggles for the uneducable..are all a waste of money inasmuch as they do not contribute to economic wealth. (although they may buy social peace by preventing blacks from burning down cities...).

As I see it, the issue is not spending money, it is spending it on things that work, never mind the pump-priming for the economy right now. Scandinavia spends about half its wealth on Programs that are social and educational, and future oriented. They also enjoy the highest per capita wealth in the world (maybe there is an oilogarchy somewhere that is higher>). Spending money on White kids in schools works for the overall economy and the social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. is pouring billions down a black and brown hole in the ground...no economic benefit because black and brown skills acquisition end at about the 8th grade.

So, fractional reserve banking is, if not the heart and soul, of capitalism, it is its legs. Likewise, all countries have central banks and "fiat" money. A national currency is worth what it can buy, nothing else. It can buy lots of goods and services if the economy is productive.

If the economy is not productive, but is sitting on piles of gold, the only thing it can sell is its gold. When the gold is gone, then it is dead in the water.

Credit runs an economy, and all credit is based on a certain degree of "faith". That faith is, for example, to be seen in your credit rating. If you have never bounced a check and paid all your bills, you have a credit rating above 800. It is similar with a county, but not exactly. It gets more political with countries for obvious reasons, but nobody can forever can get away with economic idiocy.

Joe welcomes comments.


PS:
Let me add here that war, at a purely technical level, can or could be good for the economy, but not in the way that the usual  leftie hysterics say it is. (the mere 4 or 5% of the GDP devoted to war cannot offset the overall cost to the economy in terms of useful projects that could be funded.  Thus, the economy does not need war spending.  Left-wing critics confuse morality with economics.)  Also, the U.S. economy does not need the small piles of money from arms sales.  It is negligible.  The costs of paying soldiers and keeping bases is another issue, economically, but not a large issue.  In short, the way the U.S. spends on war is a net loss, but could be a net gain, except for the genuine deterrent that ICBMs, war planes and trick guns provide.  That is another issue.  The deterrence could be maintained for a fraction of what we spend.  Think Switzerland.

The wars for Israel,  a colossal error in terms of geo-politics, could be useful wars if they did indeed result in more oil for us, and more stability in markets generally.  Neither is the case.  The oil companies did not want this war.  They operated on the formula of , if it ain't broke , don't fix it.  We have not got any oil from Iraq, no sweetheart deals, etc.  Instead we have sunk about one trillion dollars into these wars for the Jews.  Arguably Israel is not really better off, having incurred even more wrath from the Arabs and Muslims.
Of course, 9-11 was due to our support for Israel.  Jihadism is probably 90% due to Israel and our support for Israel..  The other 10% is home-grown, it has been around for  50 years or more and got its start from the failure of Arab Socialism (more or less).

But to return to economics, war can be profitable, and is a legitimate function of the state, poliltics carried on by other means.  However, in the context of the below piece,  our wars for Israel have not only cost us about a trillion up front, they will continue to cost us just for the guns and ammo, and then the economic cost of supporting Israel in terms of oil embargoes, worsened diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and the like....who knows what the economic costs to the U.S. are?....probably another trillion dollars...just look at the oil embargoes of the 70s and what that did to the economy.

So, this piece is on money and we should try to understand money since it is sort of important.  JoePs:

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Suicide jumper saved by trash | Just when you think you have heard it all...

 

Just when you think you have heard it all...

http://jp.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=173625271

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
@ 917-974-6367

What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

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Was Paris 1919 The End Of The White Race? [1 Attachment]


From: braveheart <billguru1@gmail.com>
Date: January 3, 2011 8:55:02 PM EST
To: billguru1@gmail.com
Subject: Was Paris 1919 The End Of The White Race?

 

 

WAS PARIS 1919 THE END OF THE WHITE RACE?

 

The white race is on the decline world wide. Its birth rate is below replacement level; its industrial and economic strength is waning. How did it come to pass? It all began in 1914 when a disastrous world war shattered the foundations of the white world. Some will claim that World War Two was the true shattering of the foundations. But World War Two was, after all, merely the inevitable product of the First World War. World War One bled the white west dry in many ways. It wasted the best blood of Europe by the millions. The genetic loss was incalculable. Hundreds of thousands of young men died before they could generate any offspring. The British and the French paid a terrible price. The English population has been composed of working class drones ever since the blood baths of the Somme and Passchendale. The French had to import Negroes and Mulattos from their colonial empires because the native French could not replace the battlefield hecatombs. The foundations of empire overseas were also shattered. The subject peoples could witness the whites destroying themselves. They concluded that the time for revolution was ripe. Innumerable revolts broke out in India, Lebanon and Iraq. The revolts were temporarily crushed but the genie was out of the bottle.

 

Financially, the treasure expended on the conflict ended forever "La Belle Epoque". The gold standard was overthrown and inflation has reigned ever since. The map of Europe was redrawn in a fashion guaranteed to produce revision by force and violence. The Second World War completed the process of decomposition. The remainders of the European colonial regimes were liquidated and Europe as the power center of world politics vanished from the map. The United States temporarily stepped into the shoes of Europe, 1945-1965, but now that the United States too, is an exhausted giant, economically bankrupt and suffering the ravages of racial invasion. The end of the west, 1914-1965, has been the story of fratricidal warfare and intervention in overseas conflicts. Today, the United States, having learned all the wrong lessons from two world wars, continues the process of dissolution by engaging in unaffordably expensive overseas wars. Its native white population suffers while charlatans far more criminal than the cartographers of Versailles redraw the global map.

 

 






New one.

On the Contrary: In Defense of Robert E. Lee

 

http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-defense-of-robert-e-lee.html

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
@ 917-974-6367

What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

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Tom Sunic: Feminism and Women on the Right, Parts 1 and 2

 
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Jeff Gates: "Commonsense Money" [1 Attachment]



From: Jeff Gates <jeffgates7@gmail.com>
Date: January 3, 2011 5:27:59 PM EST
To: jeff.gates@criminalstate.com
Subject: Jeff Gates: "Commonsense Money"

Please see attached commentary: "Commonsense Money" (801 words in word doc format)..

Best regards,

Jeff Gates

Commonsense Money

Since 1913, debt has been the only way that we in the U.S. have known to create moneyChoking on debt yet short on money, Americans are reeling from too much monetary theory and too little commonsense.

Those who sold us the theory also ensured recurring recessions. Each debt-induced cycle features rich-get-richer booms followed by debilitating busts. We designed our way into this mess. We can design our way out.

As yet, there's no sign that policy-makers know a way out. Nor do their advisers.Over the past century, every economist has been educated the same. They are unable to see the real problem because the theory they were taught is the source of the problem.

The U.S. Federal Reserve model of central banking was one of America's key exports. Every nation now "monetizes" pretty much the same way—with debt.

Good news is on the horizon from major exporting nations. Many of them areIslamic and flush with money. Much of that money originated as debt inindustrialized nations.

Those nations are staggering under immense debt. Much of that debt is owed tonations where they must buy oil and gas to fuel their economies and generatefunds to…repay debt.

Yet the creditors too are in a bind. Where can they prudently invest their vast pools of debt-backed money? Do they buy more U.S. government debt? Euro bonds? Do they hold their reserves in dollars, euros or pounds sterling—all debt-based?

Invest instead in commodities and they just bid up the price. That may be good news for speculators but it is not a sensible risk management strategy. So what to do? When all else fails, commonsense may yet find its way into this debate.

Tomorrow's Commodity Today

The safest commodity is one you can control. Look at China's control over rare earth metals. However control of that sort is a beggar-thy-neighbor approach, akin to investing in precious metals like gold or silver. Such investments miss the point—and the opportunity.

The commodity hedge for the foreseeable future is clean energy, particularly solarpower due to its abundance and ease of collection. Clean energy is also what must be monetized—not debt but electrons captured by solar panels and converted to useable energy.

Monetization comes with an implied promiseTo maintain value, currencies mustbe backed by productivity—the capacity to generate real goods and services.Productivity is what makes a financial security truly secure.

Those who designed America's central banking system assured us that debt-based"monetization" would be backed by real productivity. That thin tether to reality was severed in 1971 when backing for the U.S. dollar shifted from precious metals to a candid slogan now stamped on U.S. currency: "In God We Trust."

Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan not only trusted Wall Street's "financial creativity," he also enabled it with cheap credit. Layer upon layer of cross-collateralized debt produced little more than more money for financial sophisticates. Meanwhile real people living in real communities witnessed the dismantling of the U.S. economy.

Ask around. Would those with commonsense prefer their money secured with debt or with clean energy? Which is more secure?

Those who propose we reform central banking miss the point. Why reform itwhen, by design, it can gradually be displaced?

Instead of relying solely on debt-backed money, why not also issue asset-backed currencies? Why not complement centralized money with decentralized monies?Instead of one-size-fits-all money, why not tailor currencies to the diverse needs of communities?

Rather than trust in God, why not put your faith in money secured by clean energy?

Commonsense Money

Total assets in sovereign wealth funds now exceed $8.1 trillion. China has reserves approaching $2.4 trillion. Oil exporters have considerably moreincluding $1 trillion held by the United Arab Emirates and $510 billion by Norway.

As an energy exporter with large currency reserves, Russia is revisiting the wisdom of investing in other countries those funds generated by the sale of its natural resources.

With increasing frequency, political leaders are looking at the global financial crisis as an opportunity to reconsider what they monetize—and for whomThat suggests commonsense may yet find a way.

An alternative is known, available and viable with energy-backed "complementary currencies" designed to operate parallel with national currencies.

Do not expect leadership from the U.S. Those who sold us the current system retain too much control—for now.  Their interest lies in more money secured by more debt. Or backed by nothing at all.

Look for this overdue innovation to emerge from cultures long wary of those who collect fixed interest regardless of the debtor's condition. The Quran forbids it as"riba." The Bible forbids it as "the pound of flesh."

The source of this common malady is now coming sharply into focus—as is the cure.

 

Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association – How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. See www.criminalstate.com