Barney Frank is in trouble today for his support of Fannie and Freddie in 2003. Better late than never I guess. Please remove this embarrassment from Congress. I know the person who replaces him will end up being about as bad, but that will take time.
ECONOMY:
Obama and Democrats are killing jobs, and they know it. They're doing it on purpose.
Here's a couple data points showing the economy is worse than we think:
"Economists Michael Hurd and Susann Rohwedder found that between November 2008 and April 2010 “39 percent of households had either been unemployed, had negative equity in their house or had been in arrears in their house payments.” Now that is truly depressing. When people are chained to their homes it makes it that much harder to find a job.
Effects of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession on American Households"
And
"The US News provides some interesting data on the shrinking of the American middle class."Ouch.
TAX AND SPEND:
Obama wants Democrats to steal more money from Americans so he can send $250 checks to all seniors to buy their votes before the election.
The US budget deficit drops to $1.3 billion. Drops. Let's throw a party.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Bernanke to monetize more government debt in the next step of his plan to destroy the dollar. Don't tell me Bernanke doesn't know the consequences of this. He knows damn good and well that he's destroying the dollar. He knows damn good and well he's wiping out the savings accounts of every American. He's doing it on purpose. Just a year ago Geithner and Bernanke took a tour to China to convince the Chinese the Fed wouldn't monetize the debt. Now Bernanke is broadcasting that he's going to do just that and the aristocrats and their cronies are welcoming it. It's crazy. Here's some analysis.
"Bernanke showed no concern for the inflationary consequences of Fed money printing. Indeed, he chose to completely ignore the current soaring commodity prices and falling dollar. He took the stance that a little inflation is a good thing."Here's a tidbit from Bernanke:
"[T]he FOMC has found it useful to frame our dual mandate in terms of the longer-run sustainable rate of unemployment and the mandate-consistent inflation rate.... the mandate-consistent inflation rate--the inflation rate that best promotes our dual objectives in the long run--is not necessarily zero; indeed, Committee participants have generally judged that a modestly positive inflation rate over the longer run is most consistent with the dual mandate."Back to the analysis:
"This is the most stunning speech that I am aware of that a central banker has ever given.
...
It is, of course, important to monitor how much actual printing is going to be done, but all indications are that Bernanke is going all in. He is going nuclear.
The longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, William McChesney Martin, famously said that the function of the Fed is to “take away the punch bowl” when the party gets too exuberant. Bernanke is doing the opposite, he is calling ahead to the party and announcing his car is loaded up with gin, vodka, whiskey and tequila. This in itself is bizarre, since by so loudly broadcasting QE2 in advance, he is building in huge anticipation of QE2. To keep the momentum of this mad program, he will have to print more than the expectations that he has built to high heaven, otherwise QE2 will crash out of the gate. Given Bernanke's speech today, it is clear that Bernanke is fully ready to exceed expectations.
What does all this mean, if Bernanke does indeed follow through on his money printing scheme? A very quick turn upward, in a manipulated way, for the economy. Inflation will explode at a rate far in excess of what most expect. Remember, we are for the most part in a period where the desire to hold cash balances is still very high. This will reverse itself at the same time as Bernanke's money printing. Bernanke wants an increase in "aggregate demand", he is going to get it in the form of huge inflation.
Borrowers should lock in long term rates now. Although, Bernanke may start buying long term bonds, and temporarily push down rates, eventually inflation concerns will overtake Bernanke's bond buying.
We are truly headed into uncharted territory. If Bernanke follows through on the statements in his speech today, I fully expect inflation in the United States greater than what was experienced in the 1970's. It will be devastating to any one on a fixed income and it will destroy savers. It will benefit debtors at all levels, including, not coincidentally, federal, state and local governments that are in hawk across the board."I'm telling you, he's doing it on purpose. They don't call him helicopter Ben for nothing. More consequences:
"If Bernanke is telling the truth about what the Fed plans to do to us, we can also expect further tyranny in the form of capital and exchange controls, and price and wage controls, as under Nixon."Obama is looking forward to that.
This story about there being no gold in Fort Knox is awfully convenient for the conspiracy theorists.
EDUCATION:
85 percent of college students move home after graduation. How valuable is that socialist education again?
HEALTH CARE:
Yesterday I wrote:
"I wrote the same thing over a year ago. Seems Tom Coburn has figured that out as well.
The goal of Obamacare was to destroy private health insurance and private health care along with it. It was designed to collapse our health care system so the government could soon implement complete socialized medicine. And it's succeeding already."
"“There will be no insurance industry left in three years,” Coburn told the Republican Women’s Club of Tulsa County.
“That is by design. You’re going to make insurance unaffordable for everyone — which is what they want. Because if there’s no private insurance left, what’s left? Government-centered, government-run, single-payer health care.”"It's about time people are waking up, but it's probably too late.
Another example of government money corrupting science, this time in medical science.
"From The Atlantic comes the story of John Ioannidis and his team of meta-researchers, who have studied the overall state of medical research and found it dangerously and widely lacking in trustworthiness. Even after filtering out the journalistic frippery and hyperbole, the story is pretty disturbing. Some points made in the article: even the most respected, widely accepted, peer-reviewed medical studies are all-too-often deeply flawed or outright wrong; when an error is brought to light and the conclusions publicly refuted, the erroneous conclusions often persist and are cited as valid for years, or even decades; scientists and researchers themselves regard peer review as providing 'only a minimal assurance of quality'; and these shortcomings apply to medical research across the board, not just to blatantly self-serving pharmaceutical industry studies"Government corrupts everything it touches.
GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:
More fraud uncovered in Australian data.
"In the last two years some 900 mm of rainfall have been removed from the rainfall record of the Murray-Darling Basin. This startling discovery was made by comparing the annual Murray-Darling Basin rainfall reported on the Bureau of Meteorology website in August 2008 and the same report found yesterday."It never ends.
WAR ON DRUGS:
Man I hope Prop. 19 passes in California so we can see nullification in action. If the Feds try to enforce their unconstitutional drug laws, it will further undermine already dwindling support for the federal government.
POLICE STATE:
Police officer bullies, assaults then body slams girl allegedly because she had been drinking. I think we're approaching a tipping point where citizens standing by will start to defend these victims of the police. The mask is pealing off government. Government is violence, and the people are waking up to that fact.
WAR:
Story claims a Taliban terrorist has come to the US to attack. Forget for a minute that there's no way to verify this story. It may well be made up just to scare us, but let's assume it's true. Why is he here? In 230 years, the Taliban never attacked America. What changed? Oh yeah, the US government invaded their country, toppled them from power and has been waging war against them for nine years. That would make somebody angry enough to want to go attack their country. These wars are making us less safe. Bring all our troops home.
Madeline Albright accused of wanting to make a pilot fly a U2 low and slow over Baghdad so it would be shot down and Clinton could declare war. Bush is accused of the same thing.
This isn't the first war on terror, and like it's predecessor over a century ago, the threat of terrorism was greatly exaggerated, and governments instigated much of it.
"As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the popular imagination was filled with fantasies of militant Anarchism: of airborne attack and viral plagues. International terrorism made its first, furious appearance. Anarchist cells carried out a wave of bombings and assassinations across Europe and in America — or so, at least, the governments of France, Britain and especially Russia liked their populations to believe. The truth, however, was far murkier. Infiltration and surveillance comprised one part of the armory of the security services, but equally important was the use of agents provocateurs and black propaganda."Aristocrats and their cronies greatly profit from this.
POLITICS:
More Barney Frank corruption. He and Dodd are the most overtly corrupt people in Congress. I have no idea how they avoided ethics trials.
LOCAL:
This Dayton Daily News story is a hatchet job on last night's tea party.
"The Dayton Tea Party rally on Courthouse Square brought out a predominantly white, older crowd of about 900 people."I estimated 2,500 to 3,000. There were people of all ages including many families with children, and there were a number of blacks. Of course, there were more white people than black people because our community has more white people than black people, but it didn't justify bringing it up.
MISC:
One way to determine who actually owns something is to figure out who has final control. In the case of children, since government has the power to seize them whenever it wants, it's clear government has final control, and that government owns our children.
Facebook teams up with Microsoft to take on Google. Now this is an interesting development. Microsoft has been totally ineffective at competing with Google, but Facebook knows the web, nearly as well as Google, and it knows Web 2.0, which is social networking, better.
An argument for anarchy over the state, whatever the state means.
"Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state[8] and, second, by virtue of this control over the state's powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state.[9] It is unfortunate that some individuals commit crimes, but it is stunningly worse when such criminally inclined individuals wield state powers."Really? I think barring slavery any reasonable person would prefer to have lived in the US at any time over the last 230 years versus Somalia in the last decade. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Somalia is a wonderful place to live, but I don't think so. I don't get this point of view. Maybe because I don't get "the state". To me, it's government. To most of the people at mises.org, it's like a mystical monster than lives under the bed. And there's always some form of government in any society. And some forms of government are worse than others. I believe government by warlords, call them tribal chiefs, clan lords or any other name, which all anarchist-like societies I'm aware of quickly become, is worse than a government with limited powers.
I understand the argument that governments don't limit their powers in the long run. Fine. We're living that today. But again, for the last 230 years, there has been no better place on earth to live than the US. In that sense, our constitutional government, for all its flaws, has been a tremendous success. I want to build on that by taking away many of government's powers, most importantly the power to rob people at the point of a gun to fund itself. The power to tax makes government the master and the citizen the slave. It's the original sin of government from which all government corruption flows. If government agents are forced to come hat in hand asking for money for the few services they provide, which should be reduced to responding to aggression and nothing else, then we'll be in excellent shape for a long time.
"Lest anyone protest that the state's true "function" or "duty" or "end" is, as Locke, Madison, and countless others have argued, to protect individuals' rights to life, liberty, and property, the evidence of history clearly shows that, as a rule, real states do not behave accordingly. The idea that states actually function along such lines or that they strive to carry out such a duty or to achieve such an end resides in the realm of wishful thinking."That's because of the power to tax.
"Defending the continued existence of the state, despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement in robbery, destruction, murder, and countless other crimes, requires that one imagine nonstate chaos, disorder, and death on a scale that nonstate actors seem incapable of causing."This is a false choice. There is no absolute certainty that a government without the power to tax would continue its crimes. In fact, it's a virtual certainty it would not. But this line is 100 percent correct:
"The lesson of the precautionary principle is plain: Because people are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst"We're suffering that right now.
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