A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

“During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would,” Bachmann said. “And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know.”

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

“If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom,” Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn’t complicated:

It is titled: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States ”

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:”

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an “alternative” to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

“The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.”

[...]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93086

Incredible.

These people can smell that something is wrong, but are not sure what it is. They feel that they have to protect ‘their currency’, but they are not sure what it is that they need to do.

This amendment, as tabled, would actually outlaw the Dollar as it exists today.

The Federal Reserve is not ‘the United States’; it is a private bank. That means that ‘US Dollars’ are not issued by the United States, but by an entity other than the United States.

If this amendment is added to the Constitution, the US Dollar, AKA Federal Reserve Notes, will instantly cease being legal tender.

Interesting.

Are these people smarter than they appear to be, and are they trying to kill the Federal Reserve and its worthless fiat currency by a checkmate maneuver?

I doubt it.

It is more likely that they do not understand the nature of the money in their pockets; I would bet that Michelle Bachmann doesn’t know anything about the dollar, the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, commodity money, or anything about any of the real issues behind the problem at the center of what she is clumsily trying to address.

Until you understand the nature of money and currencies, it is impossible to draft legislation (or in this case, REMOVE LEGISLATION) that will permanently fix the problem.

FAIL.

I first heard these words on an Album by ‘The Pop Group’, called ‘For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder …‘. It is by The Last Poets, and it is called ‘E Pluribus Unum’.

Reading it again today, you could mistake the writers of these inspiring, insightful and brilliant words for a group of Austrian Economists:

Selfish desires are burning like fires
among those who hoard the gold
As they continue to keep the people asleep
and the truth from being told
Racism and greed keep the people in need
from getting what’s rightfully theirs
Cheating, stealing and double dealing
as they exploit the peoples fears

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes
and all the surrounding land
Buying and selling their humble dwelling
in the name of the Master Plan

Cos paper money is like a bee without honey
with no stinger to back him up
and those who stole the people’s gold
are definitely corrupt

Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills
real-estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills

Now the US mints on paper prints, millions every day
and use the eagle as their symbol cos it’s a bird of prey

The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars
are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws
filled with greed and lust,
and on the back of the dollar bill,
is the words IN GOD WE TRUST

But the dollar bill is their only God
and they don’t even trust each other
for a few dollars more they’d start a war
to exploit some brother’s mother

Now ANNUIT means and endless amount stolen over the years
and COEPTIS means a new empire of vampire millionaires
And NOVUS is a Latin word meaning something new
an ORDO means a way of life chosen by a few
SECLORUM is a word that means to take from another
knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother

Now there are thirteen layers of stone of the pyramid alone
an unfinished work of art
for thirty-three and a third is as high as a mason can go
without falling apart

Thirteen stars in the original flag!
Thirteen demons from the Devil’s bag!
Thirteen berries and thirteen leaves!
Thirteen colonies of land-grabbing thieves!
Thirteen arrows in the eagle’s claws!
Sixty-seven corporations wage the Devil’s wars!
Thirteen stripes on the eagle’s shield!
And these are the symbols on the US seal!

Now on the front of the dollar bill
to the right of Washington’s head
is a small seal in the shape of a wheel
with the secret that’s been left unsaid
The symbols in the middle represent the riddle
of the scales, the ruler and the key;
the square rule is a symbol
from the craft of masonry
The scales represent Libra
the balance of the seventh sign
They also represent the Just-Us
which you and I know is blind
The key unlocks the mysteries
of the secrets of the seal
So that only the Govern-u-men
would know what they reveal

The four words apart form the last parts of
the secrets of the seal
and tells how they fooled the people
into thinking paper money was real!

Now, THESAUR means the treasury
where they store the gold they stole
and AMER means to punish
like the slaves they bought and sold
Then SEPTENT means seven
like seventeen-seventy-six
when the thirteen devils gathered
to unleash their bag of tricks
The SIGEL means the images
they’ve created to fool the world
like the colors on Old Glory
the flag that they unfurled

Now the red was the color of the Indian man
White was the devil’s who stole the land
Blue was the eyes that hypnotized
with the tricks and traps they sprung
and even to this very same day
they all speak with forked tongue!

And so the power is in the hand of the ruling classes
playing god with the fate of all the masses
so the people don’t get any in the land of the plenty
'cause E PLURIBUS UNUM means 'One Out Of Many'

[...]

I fear that the attempts to speed up and deepen integration and to move decisions about the lives of the citizens of the member countries up to the European level can have effects that will endanger all the positive things achieved in Europe in the last half a century. Let us not underestimate the fears of the citizens of many member countries, who are afraid, that their problems are again decided elsewhere and without them, and that their ability to influence these decisions is very limited. So far, the European Union has been successful, partly thanks to the fact that the vote of each member country had the same weight and thus could not be ignored. Let us not allow a situation where the citizens of member countries would live their lives with a resigned feeling that the EU project is not their own; that it is developing differently than they would wish, that they are only forced to accept it. We would very easily and very soon slip back to the times that we hoped belonged to history.

This is closely connected with the question of prosperity. We must say openly that the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy. Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again. This results in a constant rise in both the extent of government masterminding and constraining of spontaneity of the market processes. In recent months, this trend has been further reinforced by incorrect interpretation of the causes of the present economic and financial crisis, as if it was caused by free market, while in reality it is just the contrary – caused by political manipulation of the market. It is again necessary to point out to the historical experience of our part of Europe and to the lessons we learned from it.

Many of you certainly know the name of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat and his famous Petition of the Candlemakers, which has become a well-known and canonical reading, illustrating the absurdity of political interventions in the economy. On 14 November 2008 the European Commission approved a real, not a fictitious Bastiat’s Petition of the Candlemakers, and imposed a 66% tariff on candles imported from China. I would have never believed that a 160-year-old essay could become a reality, but it has happened. An inevitable effect of the extensive implementation of such measures in Europe is economic slowdown, if not a complete halt of economic growth. The only solution is liberalisation and deregulation of the European economy.

[...]

http://klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=88EY96UW9zlp

I KNEW this man would be good!

It seems like the pressure is increasing on a daily basis. Look at this clip from the floor of the NYSE:

The seething anger is leaking out. Soon, the default action will be to say, “No”, and the REALLY angry people will be taking up arms.

It’s about BLOODY TIME.

California is broke.
Kansas is about to go broke.
New York is trying to tax everything under the sun to avoid going broke (it won’t work Mr. Bloomberg).

And in the EU, we read that the Telegraph printed a story about how

European banks may need £16.3 trillion bail-out, EC document warns

Only to immediately delete the story on orders so that bank runs would not be triggered.

Now, as we have been saying, if a bank does not operate a fractional reserve, it doesn’t matter if all the depositors come to get their money out at the same time; the money is actually there, unlike in today’s banks, where the money is NOT there.

Bit I digress a little.

The EU is, with any luck, FINISHED. When the euro collapses it will be the death blow to the EU. Each country is going to go back, re-launch their national currencies, tear up the bogus treaties and enslaving agreements that have made up this bad deal that betrays the hearts of nations and steals from the pockets and spirits of men.

No nation is going to ever again accept this extremely dangerous monetary monoculture. Think about it; why should the Italians suffer the wiping out of all their savings because some Germans made mistakes with the centrally controlled monolithic currency? If you are going to have your hard earned money wiped out, at least let it be by the act of other Italians; then you can string them upside down and shoot them for satisfaction; at least then you have someone to blame.

With the EU president chiseling from the top and all the citizens rioting from the base, the whole structure will fracture and shatter into a quadrillions pieces that will never be put back together again, and any future attempt will not look like the debacle that has been forced upon everyone today.

As for America, they are actively preparing for civil unrest. Google it for yourself. Like I have been saying for many years; if there is one country on earth that can turn itself around from the precipice it is the United STates of America. Only the men of that country have the balls (and the guns) to make the magic happen. I really do hope that they act as an example to the whole world once again. Either way, there is no going back. There is not enough money in the world to pay off the US debt. Europe cannot find the $25 trillion (twice the size of the gross domestic product of European Union) they need to ’save’ themselves.

BOOM!

md wrote:
nagapie wrote:
Brixton’s getting it’s own currency.

Is it going to be made out of a precious metal (i.e. either gold or silver)?

I can’t pretend to even understand, let alone agree with, the various long term bug bears of the small Irdial group of bloggers, but fiat currency is an issue they post about frequently, and they vehemently support the set up of independent currencies based on precious metals.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/index.php?s=fiat

They keep contradicting themselves though. First they bang on about the reintroduction of the gold standard and then they say this:

We then went on to discuss why trans-national currencies ‘Currency Monocultures’ like the Euro are a bad thing.

Imagine that the Euro never happened, and each European country had kept its own currency. Each country would be able to formulate its own response to bank failures, and their currency would suffer or gain depending on their response. Each person with savings could hold a basket of currencies to protect themselves from being wiped out by inflation.

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures! Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment. Moreover, if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed (because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency). And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Now, lets go through this slowly:

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures!

[...]

http://disception.net/lk/viewtopic.php?t=8117&start=25

No, this is incorrect.

First of all, Gold IS money. Sound economies are based on gold as the means of exchange. Government cannot create the money out of thin air when it is made of gold, they cannot print it. Gold is scarce and the amount of it in circulation cannot be arbitrarily increased.

Bank failures (bank runs) happen because of fractional reserve banking. Banks, when they are given a license to do business, are allowed to ‘print money’. When you deposit £10,000 in your account, the government allows your bank to loan out say, 40 times that amount to other people. Those people then pay interest on the money that is loaned to them. If you or I were to do this, it would be called ‘counterfeiting’ but because its a licensed bank, its called ‘banking.

The system ‘works’ as long as everyone who holds an account at the bank does not ask for their deposits back at the same time (a bank run). Since the banks run fractional reserves, they literally do not have the money to pay back their depositors.

Centuries ago, when people used gold for money in every day transactions, the danger of theft was ever present. Banks used to hold deposits, and since they were trustworthy, would issue I.O.U.s to their depositors. People began to trade these I.O.U.s because they knew that the money was in the bank and redeemable at any time. This is the origin of gold backed paper money.

The bankers realized that they could print I.O.U.s for gold that they did not have on deposit. As long as the I.O.U.s did not all come back at once, they could gain interest on gold they did not have in their vaults.

Pure Genius!

Modern banking runs exactly the same way, only the ‘money’ is Fiat Currency; money that is given value by order of the government by legal tender laws. It is paper, a fiction, worthless. And of course, the government has the printing press that can create ‘value’ out of nothing.

Lets say you earn £500 pounds a week. If there are only £2,000,000 paper pounds in the whole world, then the amount that you can buy with your £500 remains the same, week on week, year on year. But, lets now imagine that the government has doubled the money supply. There are now £4,000,000 paper pounds in existence. That means that the scarcity of paper pounds has been reduced by half. There is twice as much money in circulation. This means that your £500 is now worth half as much as it was when there were only £2,000,000 paper pounds in circulation.

You have just been cheated out of half of the value of your money.

Now, if there is one currency, and you cannot vote for the government who controls it, and it is a fiat currency, you are essentially giving the printing press for that money to someone who you cannot elect. They can destroy the value of your savings. If however, you have a paper currency and it is under the control of your own elected officials, if they debase the money, you can vote them out and the next government can destroy some of the money supply and restore the value of your savings.

If the money you use is gold, then no government, no matter who runs it, can print your money. It actually is your money, literally. The pound is not ‘your money’; it belongs to the government. They control its supply, they control its value.

Inflation is just what I described; the money supply increasing because of the printing press. If we had a gold standard, we would have no inflation by definition. Take a look at this YouTube video which demonstrates how the value of gold has not changed over time.

Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment.

Like I say above, gold IS money. In a gold standard currency system you use gold as money, not paper that is linked or tied to anything.

There is no ‘world reserve of gold’ central banks of separate sovereign nations have their own reserves of gold, like the gold at Fort Knox. When the dollar (for example) was backed by gold before the Bretton Woods agreement, you used to be able to go to the bank and redeem gold (and silver) for paper dollars which were certificates that represented actual physical gold and silver. When you say ‘your’ main tool, who exactly are you talking about? That ‘your’ is the same ‘you’ that destroys the value of ‘your’ savings by printing money. The people who run central banks are not able to set interest rates correctly or control unemployment, for the record. Only the market can do this. But that’s more typing.

if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed

There are no exchange rates, because everyone would be using real money (gold coins) to do their business with. Did you know that in Viet Nam, people buy and sell land in gold? There is nothing strange about it at all; what is strange is that people think its acceptable that government can steal your savings from you without even going into your bank!

(because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency)

This line demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what money is. When you say that a county’s currency starts to depreciate, what EXACTLY do you mean? If you mean that it loses its value, this can only happen if someone has access to the printing press that allows people to create money out of thin air. A gold currency cannot be printed, so any country using it would not suffer from inflation (which is actually what you are describing, NOT depreciation which is what your car does ten minutes after you have bought it). Take a look at this to understand what the word inflation really means in this context.

And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Try gold hat :)

Apart from having a gold standard, fractional reserve banking needs to be understood (note how I do not say ‘banned’) by depositors. If you are crazy enough to deposit your gold money in a bank that lends out many multiples of the amount of deposits, you are taking a big risk; they had better be paying you big interest rates. You and the bank had better be insured against bank runs. As we have seen there are moves afoot to run clean banks.

I assume that you are not in favor of war and the recent mass murdering. The war machine is financed by fiat currency running off of government printing presses. Gold currency forces discipline on governments. This alone is a reason why it should be adopted; everything else would be a great bonus.

You should also look up the Totnes Pound, which is an interesting development. Also, California is issuing its own Currency in the form of I.O.Us. They are not saying its a currency but of course, if they start exchanging them around LA, it will be a currency by definition.

Finally, if you want to watch a really fascinating documentary about this subject and educate yourself so that you can understand a little of what BLOGDIAL publishes on this subject, you could do worse than The Money Masters. When you can understand why a stick of wood with grooves in it was one of the longest running currencies ever, then you will have arrived!

UPDATE!

Added reciprocal facepalm.

This is one of Alun’s comments, that simply had to be promoted to a full post:

“Martin Barnes, chief executive of the think tank DrugScope, who sits on the advisory council, said it was crucial that a rigorously independent body was entrusted with this type of research. [...]

Mr Barnes added that when no other drug was involved, ecstasy accounted for between 10-17 deaths a year. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7882708.stm

For comparison:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1091

“Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991. The alcohol-related death rate was 13.3 per 100,000 population in 2007, compared with 6.9 per 100,000 population in
1991.”

Back to the report and responses to it:

“The Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales has expressed opposition to suggestions that ecstasy should be downgraded to a Class B drug.

Ian Johnston, president of the association, told the BBC the downgrade could be dangerous.

He said: “This is not some academic or scientific exercise, this is dealing with people’s lives. If we downgrade ecstasy, we are in danger of sending mixed messages out to young and vulnerable people.”

Last month, the Home Office restored cannabis from Class C to Class B, against the wishes of the advisory council.

Ministers are now set to resist the council’s recommendation on ecstasy. “[...]

So, what exactly is the mixed message?
That heroin is as ‘good’ as E, or that E is as ‘bad’ as heroin?
That 30 deaths from an untaxed substance is bad, but 8724 deaths from a heavily taxed substance is acceptable?
That independent, expert advice is necessary, but worthless?
That arses and elbows are identical in Jacqui Smiths head?

Or that while HMG claims to know “What is Right and Wrong for You”, HMGs response to this report yet again only demonstrates why only idiots submit to governmental control over what goes in their body?

A vigilant lurker writes:

I had to send you this abstract. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full article. 

1: Am J Public Health. 2009 Feb 5. [Epub ahead of print] Links

The Moral Justification for a Compulsory Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Program.

Balog JE.

The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Compulsory human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination of young girls has been proposed as a public health intervention to reduce the threat of the disease. Such a program would entail a symbiotic relationship between scientific interests in reducing mortality and morbidity and philosophical interests in promoting morality. This proposal raises the issue of whether government should use its police powers to restrict liberty and parental autonomy for the purpose of preventing harm to young people. I reviewed the scientific literature that questions the value of a HPV vaccination. Applying a principle-based approach to moral reasoning, I concluded that compulsory HPV vaccinations can be justified on moral, scientific, and public health grounds.

One can contact him here:

Joseph E. Balog, PhD

State University of New York, College at Brockport
Health Science
350 New Campus Drive
19 Hartwell Hall
Brockport NYUSA
14420
Email: jbalog@brockport.edu

And if you want a laugh, take a look at his ‘justifications’ in the presentation linked at this page…
http://apha.confex.com/apha/135am/techprogram/paper_152993.htm

This reminds me of a certain Joseph Mengele:

Who also justified his human experimentation on the grounds that he was doing it for the ‘greater good’ and ‘in the name of science’.

Morality should NEVER be legislated, and it is not the job of scientists to determine what is or is not moral on behalf of anyone. It is even more of an outrage that this modern Mengele

wants to use his ’scientific’ method to create a moral position that will be translated into a law that will cause millions to be injected with this worthless vaccine.

Here are some of the links on Gardasil from BLOGDIAL:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1256
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=490
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=846
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=838
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=831

While we are at it, HPV is not a public health issue, it is a personal health issue because HPV is an STD. In order to become infected with it, you have to have sex with someone. That is a private act that has nothing to do with the state.

HPV cannot be sneezed onto someone, cannot cause an epidemic resulting in millions of deaths due to casual contact. It is quite different from the other highly contagious diseases, and even with those, vaccination is not compulsory in civilized countries.

It’s one thing to develop a product (Gardasil) and then use corruption, fear-mongering and the perversion of statistics to influence people to choose to have it shot into themselves by the millions; it is quite another to try and engineer a fallacious malignant morality wrapped in the authoritative voice of ’science’ as a pretext for new law that will compel parents to violate their children.

Treatises on morality should never appear in a scientific paper. They should be published in the appropriate place. Publishing a tract justifying the morality of something in a scientific journal or paper is wrong because science is about facts and evidence only; it is not about making a personal judgement.

When we mix science with morality the former lends its power, the power of facts that can be proven and all the results that have flowed from that to create all the great tools that we enjoy today, to the latter, which is purely subjective. Balog believes that all girls should be shot with Gardasil. This is not a scientific fact, or at least the question of wether or not they should be shot with it is not a fact. What he believes applies only to him, and his twisted sick morality, whereas scientific truth applies to everyone like it or not.

And for the record, by ’scientific truth’ I do not mean what any scientist knows or does not know, or what is written in peer reviewed journals. What scientists know is a number, when all the facts of the universe are taken into account, indistinguishable from zero. I am talking about gravity. Gravity ‘holds you down’ no matter what you think or like, or what its true nature is. Homeopathic medicine works, wether you like it or not. Gardasil is junk. Get shot with it if you like, but no one should be forced to be injected with it. The same goes for all other vaccines; they should never be injected into people by force, for any reason.

Finally, monsters like this man are a part of the concerted effort to dismantle the family as the center of human culture. They want to replace the family with the state and themselves as the ultimate authority over all life on this planet.

Gabby Swank was a straight-A student and cheerleader.

But that was before she became very ill following the standard dose of three Gardasil vaccinations, Attkisson reports.

You know the commercial. It showed teenage girls saying “I want to be one less” who gets the HPV virus, which is linked to cervical cancer.

“It was like a big hype among my friends, because we’re like, ‘we’re gonna get it’ because we felt almost pressured by the commercials,” Gabby said.

Gabby got sicker after each shot, progressing to seizures, strokes and heart problems. It was her neurologist who suspected Gardasil was to blame.

“I think there are too many people having serious long-term side-effects,” said neurologist Dr. Dwight Lindholm.

Last fall, the government and vaccine maker Merck concluded there’s no link between Gardasil and serious adverse events like Gabby’s. But a new analysis calls that finding into question.

The National Vaccine Information Center, a private vaccine-safety group, compared Gardasil adverse events to another vaccine, one also given to young people, but for meningitis. Gardasil had three times the number of Emergency Room visits – more than 5,000. Reports of side effects were up to 30 times higher with Gardasil.

“If I’d have known, we never would have gotten the shot,” said Emily Tarsell, whose daughter, Chris, died three weeks after her third Gardasil shot. She was one of the 29 fatalities reported in two years. “And she’d be here to hug.”

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the NVIC, said: “Now we know from this report that there are more reactions and deaths associated with Gardasil than with another vaccine given in the same age group. It’s irresponsible not to take action.”

Merck, the FDA and CDC question the value of the new analysis, say they continue to review the data, Gardasil remains safe and effective, and its benefits outweigh the risks.

Those who believe the vaccine hurt them aren’t convinced. Gabby isn’t cheering anymore and is too sick to even attend school.

“I struggle with guilt a lot, because I made the choice to get the shot for her,” said Gabby’s mom, Shannon Swank.

Meantime, Merck has asked the FDA to approve it for boys, who can pass on the cancer causing virus to girls, meaning the number of people getting Gardasil may double.

[...]

CBS News

We.
Told.
You.
So.

The true character of a man is revealed when he is under pressure…so they say.

The riots in Paris and the demonstrations against foreign work forces being used at British oil refineries and a power station seemed to be a presentiment of widespread civil disturbance, especially in this country. We are, after all, only at the beginning of a slump which is predicted by the IMF to hit Britain more seriously than any other developed nation. It will be longer and deeper and we can already see the hardship, the bills accumulating.

We need this civil disobedience. I hope that some of the people who plan destruction have the sense to trash only the systems and places that they use to ruin everyone’s lives. Smashing McDonalds and Starbucks is just STUPID.

In the last week, it seems that I have hardly had a conversation that has not dwelled on the economic crisis and how we arrived at a position where we are paying to bail out the bankers, who are still claiming vast bonuses, and face finding another £20bn each year in taxes or losing that amount in services.

And it is a safe bet that in none of these conversations did the phrase ‘fiat currency’ ever pass anyone’s lips. Another safe bet would be that ‘fractional reserve banking’ was never uttered. The fact is that no one who writes for the Guardian knows why this ‘crisis’ happened. None of them understand what money is. All of them are whining about banker bonuses as if that had anything at all to do with this problem. Jealousy politics is alive and well and serving its purpose to divert thinking people away from the true causes of their misery. The fact of the matter is that government is STEALING from the public to disburse money inefficiently, if not fraudulently. In any case, it is certainly immoral. These banks should not be bailed out by any government. Period.

If it had been a matter of straight theft

It IS straight theft; from YOU to the STATE to the BANKERS.

– ie the damage done was equal to every bonus –

this is nonsense maths. The bonuses are IRRELEVANT.

the world economy could easily absorb the hit,

There is no ‘world economy’. This is a matter of YOUR money being stolen and redistributed to bankers. There is no collective entity that you can call a ‘world economy’. This is loose english at its best.

but there is a vast multiple involved between the amount taken in bonuses and the bail-out received from governments. Figures to be published in Vanity Fair next week show that the bail-out in the US is anything up to 900 times the bonuses paid to the top five executives of leading American banks. At Citicorp, bonuses equalled $54m in 2007 while the bail-out was $45bn. This ratio doesn’t capture anything like the economic consequences of greed on both sides of the Atlantic. They are incalculable. The crime is nearly the equivalent to poisoning of the world’s water supply. If the banking industry and advocates of unregulated market capitalism expect a return to normal service after the slump they are gravely mistaken.

The only people who are ‘gravely mistaken’ are those who think that bonuses have any meaning, and that there ever has been a place where unregulated market capitalism has been running. Once again, there is no such thing as ‘the world’s water supply’ there is no one world anything. Constantly referring to things in these terms is simply absurd, and it is part of the problem.

It is fortunate for the hedge fund managers and derivative traders in Britain that the London mob does not materialise at moments like this to drag them from their spruced-up homes and limousines as regularly happened in the 18th century.

Yes indeed, that would help! If hedge fund managers and derivative traders lose their money, what do you care if your money is sound and in a bank that is not exposed? If you owned your own money and kept it safely, you would not have a problem at all.

In one way, it is also regrettable, because then the mob, which, incidentally, is a shortening of mobile vulgus, affected the conduct of politics and on several occasions changed things for the better.

That may be so, but until people understand what money is, all the mobs and rioting in the world will never solve this problem. You need to watch (as a beginning) The Money Masters to understand what is really happening, and how value is being stolen from you. Unless you are willing to do the small amount of work it takes to understand economics and money, you will NEVER be able to understand what is going on.

It was not made up of the depraved and violent underclass found in most historical accounts, but of groups of young working men and apprentices who, while demonstrating for Protestantism and against foreign workers, also played their part in supporting liberty.

You cannot have liberty without money that actually belongs to you. Misunderstanding this is why you FAIL.

Something of their voice was heard last week outside the refineries where foreign workers have been employed en masse instead of British workers, but in London, everything is – for the moment – quiet.

Those people are not ‘foreign’ they are from the EU, which Guardian types are all for. You cannot open up to the EU and then expect them NOT to come here and work when they have the RIGHT to do so. If you did not want Italians working here, you should never have joined the EU o Great Britain. Once again, the brainless demonstrators show just how STUPID they are; they should be protesting British membership of the EU (the cause of those workers coming here) and not the workers…its like treating acne by putting on a topical cream instead of weaning the teenager off of his diet of Tizer and crisps. Not very smart!

We are slower to anger than the French, although I must say that if I were a member of my children’s generation I would very much feel like hurling the odd carton of milk at politicians and bankers of the older generation.

Once again, this is why you FAIL. Your position as a writer could be used, right now, to direct people to the correct information about this problem; unsound money, fractional reserve banking, and regulation. Sadly this will not happen. Or will it? Who knows?

For the people who are going to pay for the lunatic exuberance of the last decade are not its perpetrators – largely the baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 – but those born after 1985 and, by the way, several succeeding generations.

The people who are going to pay for the bailouts are the suckers. Everyone who knows what is really happening will not pay a penny. The people who are not helping are the ones who are steadfastly persisting in bad thinking and willful ignorance.

To put it crudely, my generation has stolen from its children and grandchildren.

That is a lie. It is ASTONISHING how the pundits and spin masters have turned this crisis around so that the INNOCENT now believe that they are THE GUILTY PARTY in this. How they did it should be studied by everyone everywhere.

It is they who will be affected by £20bn per annum shaved off services and for as long as anyone can predict.

Once again, only the suckers will be paying for this nonsense. As for services, their degradation was always inevitable. To understand why, you have to understand money (what money really is) and economics. You could try Googling ‘Social security Ponzi Scheme’ to find out why degradation was always going to happen.

And this crisis means that we are about to fail in that other important obligation of providing jobs for people coming out of university and school.

Once again, total and complete FAIL.

There is no collective obligation to provide jobs for anyone, so to say ‘we’ are about to fail is nonsense. You cannot be FOR liberty on the one hand and ALSO FOR collective responsibility and accountability of the type that is the driving philosophy behind bailing out banks. Then again, being able to hold two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously is a required skill these days is it not?!

Last Friday, it was reported that unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 16.1%, which is above the European average of 15.9%. That figure is bound to grow over the next two years.

Water always finds it’s own level.

Look coldly at my generation, the one that’s has been claiming every sort of entitlement since the Who sang about it, and you realise that we have been criminally irresponsible.

It is criminally irresponsible to not try and understand what is really happening, and then to perpetuate it by claiming that there are collective responsibilities to provide jobs and every other sort of nonsense. It is criminally irresponsible to prop up that system, and to not try and inform people of its true nature. At the very least, since you cannot throw stones, you would be able to say, “I tried to warn everyone. I did what I could do”.

We are leaving the people born after 1985 not just with the bills for this economic mess, but we also expect them to pay for an increase in the cost of state pensions for us, a rise of benefits and soaring pensioner health costs, which has been clear in demographic studies for some time.

You can expect anything you like. Your pension is TOAST. No one is going to foot the bill for it, there will be no money for it. You were robbed. Deal with it. Start saving NOW…saving REAL MONEY.

How young people are going to get started in paying for our old age without jobs and with a credit crunch and a frozen property market is anyone’s guess.

That is an astonishing statement. The concern is not how young people are going to get started paying for YOU, the concern is how are they going to LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and THEIR children! The selfishness, corruption, immorality and thievery never ends!

Consider the political classes of today, the people who clustered round Tony Blair – born a month after me in 1953 – and who have been in charge for more than a decade. What have they done to make politics and the business of Parliament responsive to the widely appreciated needs of this century?

That is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is who destroyed the money, who stole it, and what are you going to do about it. Note how I do not say, “who destroyed our money”. I am not under the delusion that the pounds in your pocket belong to you. They do not.

Though there are many well-intentioned politicians, politics probably hasn’t been held in such low esteem since the time of the London mob. It simply fails to deliver. Even in the good years, the government spent vast amounts on education and health, but failed to secure a proportionate rise in standards and productivity.

People who are for liberty hold politicians in low esteem by default, reflexively. They also do not expect government to deliver. They do not expect government to secure standards and productivity. People who are for liberty understand that not only is that not the proper role of government, but they also understand that government is incapable of doing these things, and if they do try, they do it inefficiently and immorally.

I won’t try your patience with my generation’s failure on rights and liberty,

We already gave up on you years ago…where have you been?! Not on the internets clearly.

its casual erosion of the privileges that were passed to us by our parents,

THIS IS WHY YOU FAIL. Rights are not a PRIVILEGE that is handed to you; you are BORN WITH THEM.

or its bewildering ignorance of history,

I am no historian, but honestly, when it comes to the history of money ignorance is absolutely EVERYWHERE. Even when there is a crisis people are too thick to try and find out what is really happening. That is the unforgivable sin. Even when people know some history, they sit there and stupidly repeat the mistakes of the past over and over, and then whine when things are getting worse. Knowing history is not enough. You need to know what your place is, what your rights are, what rights are and how to solve problems.

but it is important to understand that at the heart of the deterioration is Parliament and in this sense politics, rather than society, is broken.

This is completely wrong. Parliament is not at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is in a generation of people who do not understand their place in the world, who do not understand what Liberty is, what Rights are, the very nature of man and why it is he owns things. Parliament is the pimple, its corruption and arrogance a symptom of a disease. The people are sick and stupid and brainwashed. They are not even able to frame their thoughts properly so that they can address these problems. That is why they talk about ‘our’ money, and ‘our’ democracy and all the other backwards, wrong headed nonsense that we read over and over again.

Last week, a friend said that what he found so frustrating in the scandal involving peers allegedly offering to influence laws for cash, as well as the apparent immunity of bankers, was the absence of justice.

You tolerate Parliament, put them at the centre of your life and philosophy and so therefore, the problem is YOU and you perception of your place in the world. There will always be corrupt people, and politics normally attracts the corrupt…morally corrupt that is…the bankers, once again, are not the problem, and focusing on them is very stupid, pointless and childish.

None of the 3,000 offences introduced by Labour apparently caters for lords and multi-millionaires.

And yet, you have, “always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all”. That is the result of your belief. Total enslavement and impoverishnemt. The problem is YOU.

But this is minor compared with the crisis in the way laws – often designed to serve the political classes of my generation – are drafted and passed without proper scrutiny.

The problem is that they are passing them at all. They need to be REMOVING legislation, not adding it. And you need to stop looking to them like a sheep and to start disobeying.

My generation wanted everything – good food, cheap travel, large disposable incomes, luxury and security – and we have had them all, but at a great cost.

Bollocks. All of those things come at a price. If the next generation wants those things, then they can have them. All they have to do is pay the price and TAKE them. Your generation needs to be cut loose, your pensions cancelled and the debt defaulted on. Then we can start from a clean slate with sound commodity money and none of the collectivist illusions that have so befuddled and corrupted the men of this land.

We knew about climate change a long time ago, yet our government all but ignored it until the Tories made the running

There you go again. Global Warming Kool Aid nonsense AND saying ‘our government’ in a SINGLE SENTENCE!

We knew that bankers had not discovered the secret of limitless wealth creation, but we failed to regulate.

Bankers do not create wealth. Regulation destroys peoples ability to do it. You people will NEVER learn. And ‘we’ do not regulate. There is no ‘we’ in this debacle. THEY your ENEMY regulates and destroys and murders, and no, it is not on ‘our behalf’ either.

He let it slip, “It’s not your money!”.

And now if my children’s generation demonstrates, we will deploy a newly equipped and trained riot police to protect us. You see we have been expecting trouble.

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/01/henry-porter-recession

The trouble will be far deeper and more widespread than you can possibly imagine. No riot squad will be able to contain it. At the end of this process, you and the government you cherish so deeply, even as it flays the flesh from your back with a cat o nine tails, will be utterly defeated. The people who truly understand freedom, liberty and rights will ensure that your world and its vile illusions never returns.

Some of the commenters on this article are beginning to see the light:

Sure Henry – and if you were twenty years older you’d be dead. Our confrontation with the political and business classes does not require youth, we are not throwing rocks and burning tyres – we have a series of modifications that we require of the commercial system to ensure it operates fairly in future. These are not for debate or modification – they are our requirements.

1/ We will restore some measure of value to our currency so that it will be known to us in the same way the length of a metre and the weight of a kilogram are known to us.

You see? The penny has dropped.

Sound money is the NUMBER ONE priority of everyone who understands this problem. Everything flows from it, all conditions are influenced by it.

A lurker who saw this same article says:

I don’t think the UK has the right culture for properly directed riots, a la Belle France for example. There is a small hardcore of politicised activists, such as seen in the poll tax riots, anti-fox-hunting and so on… but no mass body of free-thinking students (for example) with the will to put their high brows in the line of fire. Most other people have kids and would place family safety first. I just don’t see a proper riot as getting anywhere. Not reflective of the will of the general populace, too abstract in a way, and just a fight against police when what we need is a fight against HMG et al. The Iraq demo, and possibly BBC license fee avoidence – that’s what appeals to the middle-england masses. Other people (Sun/Mirror readership?) with job losses and SkyOne to pay for… will they act, and how? Will the miners strikes return in another guise? There is the real power in numbers. Get the two halves together and it could be special…

I just went off in a daydream where a crowd the size of the Iraq demonstration massed on parliament and took it over by mass of numbers, no violence required. Sky news offices next, and Buck House, followed by all the financial institutions of which the public own a slice. Gordon Brown makes one last public address, apologising for his sins and commits seppuku on live TV. The entire Labour front bench follow suit. A nation rejoices, shame is banished and national pride restored. The Tories are too yellow to take power following this and a new system of decentralised government is brought in…

10cm snow here, and more coming. Its gorgeous!

A little snow, and Britain is shut down.

When the people of Britain are ready, they will whip up a blizzard that will erase the evil once and for all. Like the Soviet Union, the Britain of the past will be a memory, and in its place will rise the sort of country that we used to love.

Only TEN THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!

The Blogdial stance on the ‘independence’ of the BBC is well documented.

Two things crossed my path in the last few days regarding the BBC. Firstly, I read a ’story’, actually a magazine piece, about Darwin and his attitude to slavery. The piece appeared to suggest that it was his anti-slavery stance which resulted in the theory of evolution clicking into place in Darwins thought processes.

This was on the front page of the BBC website, and in your face on the Science subsection. And all it is is a glorified puff-piece for a book, full of conjecture and nothing more.

We read that…

[...] new evidence suggests that Darwin’s unique approach to evolution – relating all races and species by “common descent” – could have been fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.

And this new evidence? Nowhere to be found. Everything said in this piece I already knew from reading the excellent Darwin biography published by these same authors in 1992.

So why is the BBC plugging this cash-cow as part of their Darwin season? It is nothing but another example of licence fee money wasted. The BBC is riddled with these pieces; non-news, non-attributed, non-stories of no discernible benefit to licence fee payers.

There I am, glad once again that I do not pay the licence fee, and wondering why those who do pay allow the BBC to get away with such behaviour when this hits my inbox…

>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>> Subject:     Re: Fwd: Re: BBC Gaza appeal ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
>>> Date:        Tue, 23 Jan 2009 10:25:26 -0000 (GMT)
>>> To:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> To all British TV viewers,
>>>
>>> We have all seen the terrible devastation of lives in Gaza. Without
>>> thinking about the causes for the moment, we can all, as human
>>> beings, feel empathy for the children that are being maimed and
>>> killed there.
>>>
>>> The BBC who are financed by our money, have refused to show, quite
>>> absurdly and cold heartedly, a humanitarian request for aid to help
>>> alleviate the suffering.
>>>
>>> This is the last straw.
>>>
>>> The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
>>> the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
>>> ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.
>>>
>>> In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
>>> you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
>>> pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.
>>>
>>>
>>> Can you in good conscience support the BBC with your money, when they
>>> are so clearly under the influence of people to the extent that they
>>> would refuse an appeal for aid to help children in a crisis?
>>>
>>> There have been other crisis appeals and the BBC has transmitted
>>> appeals immediately and in full. It is clear that this is a blatant
>>> case of bias. The question now is, what are the other things that the
>>> BBC has not shown that should have been? It is clear that we can no
>>> longer trust them; if they can sit in their studios and watch
>>> children die and refuse to even read out an address to help dying
>>> children, they do not deserve our respect and certainly they do not
>>> deserve our money.
>>>
>>> I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
>>> license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
>>> they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us
>>> when they are so fundamentally out of touch with us and the rest of
>>> humanity.
>>>
>>> If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
>>> from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
>>> opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
>>> SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
>>> what they have to offer, they will pay for it.
>>>
>>> The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
>>> to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
>>> longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
>>> care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
>>> unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at the BBC's refusal to show the appeal for Gaza,
>>> if you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
>>> world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their
>>> audience, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
>>> that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
>>> do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> An Ex TV License payer.

CLANG!

A penny drops.

And somebody, somewhere, finally realizes that money talks. Somebody, somewhere realizes that non-compliance IS an option. Not only that, but non-compliance is the RIGHT option.

Somebody, somewhere has had enough, and I’m surprised it has taken so long. I’m disappointed that it has taken something like the Gaza Appeal Fracas to get them moving, but so what, they are moving.

Without the accompaniment of the sounds of heart strings being plucked, here is the distilled version:

To all British TV viewers,
The BBC who are financed by our money.
The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.

In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.

It is clear that we can no longer trust them; they do not deserve
 our respect and certainly they do not deserve our money.

I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us.

If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
what they have to offer, they will pay for it.

The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.

If you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
world, and if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
do not matter, please forward this to someone you know

Without going on too much longer, lets reinforce the message with a little substitution…

>>> HMG will then have to respond directly to its employers or cease to exist because no one will pay for their idiocy. It will no longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not care about what the public wants or thinks, and that they are a law unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at HMGs behaviour regarding [war x, y or z; ID cards, NIR, corruption, nepotism], if you think that it is time for HMG to grow up and join the real world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their EMPLOYERS, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization that doesn’t care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.

Get the message. And get the message out.

Thanks to Travis at Ron Paul News for this, who wrote, “This should make you smile…” He knows that we have written before about Cargo Cult effects in relation to that other subject that we all know and love so well.

Cargo Cult Economics
In a recent email exchange about our larger social situation Robert Klassen used a term that simply jumped off the computer screen at me.

Cargo Cult.

It may not hit you the same way, but it sure raised the wattage of the lights in my world. I turned to Wikipedia for a few details and didn’t need to even page down to see all that I needed.

Members, leaders, and prophets of cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods (“cargo”) of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake.

Now let me rewrite that passage from the standpoint of politicians, reporters, most academic economists, executive branch administrators, and quite a few heads of corporations:

Members, leaders, and prophets of the government-regulated economy cults maintain that the manufactured goods (productive economy) of the Free Market have been created by spiritual or ideological means (Gaia or egalitarian socialism/Keynesian-monetarist policy, respectively), and are intended for the cult’s members, but that, unfairly, the Free-Market capitalists have gained control of these objects through attraction of this wealth to themselves by malice and greed.

Like Cargo Cultists in New Guinea, truly these people don’t know any better. Even highly placed and widely quoted professional economists are as ignorant of the source of economic wealth as were stone age tribesmen whose first contact with technology was with people landing airplanes in the jungle.

The cultists’ spending on (or cheering for) the bailouts, stimulus payments, and infrastructure “investments” is based on the belief that it is money that causes economic prosperity, just like cargo cultists thought that if they built straw models of airplanes and recreated airstrips the “cargo” would return.

When I go to the store to buy something with money, the only reason I have money to spend is because someone paid me to produce what it is I do at work. My job lasts only so long as I produce in value for my employer more than I cost to employ, and my job’s security exists only so long as my employer’s production is profitable.

As I see it, it is production that makes the human world go around and supports our wonderful standard of living. Money is a useful accounting of that production, unless fraud is involved (e.g. fractional reserve banking and central bank operations as a whole).

Why do Cargo Cult Economists cling so tightly to the notion that spending alone can solve the problems of the day?

I think part of the answer is that they have no way to define productivity. Instead of seeing productivity as action that yields something that can be sold profitably on the free market, they appear to cling to the Labor Theory of Value where labor alone defines value produced.

They seem to think that all it takes to make a job is a worker and someone to pay him. If no employer stands ready to do so, the manager of a government program can hire him to dig a ditch and fill it in. A job is a job.

In the news recently was an employee sit-in at defunct Republic Windows in Chicago. The company lost its credit line from Bank of America and a major investor recently wrote off a twelve million dollar investment in the company as valueless.

The employees are demanding severance and accrued vacation pay as mandated by federal law. Apparently unbeknownst to them, their work was producing nothing of value, defined as things sold at a profit. The company produced losses, not profits, which revealed that anyone working there was engaged in unproductive work, no matter how many windows they made.

Politicians with the state of Illinois and city of Chicago threatened to end their business ties with Bank of America if the bank didn’t somehow help the employees get what they wanted. In this microcosm we see that membership in Cargo Cult Economics is nearly universal. Jobs aren’t endeavors that produce economically viable goods and services, they’re just something that takes up time, requires some kind of effort, and results in a paycheck. All that matters is work, not that what is produced is economically viable. The idiotic Labor Theory of Value is clearly part and parcel of Cargo Cult Economics.

Spending on make-work jobs and economically non-viable production generates nothing but waste. It wastes the money of those people taxed (extorted) to pay for it and it wastes the time of those doing the work when they should be out developing new skills in other jobs that, when so employed, produce profits. Such spending also steals money from the suppliers of goods and services taxpayers would have preferred to purchase; society as a whole gets poorer with every cycle.

Instead of progress we get regress.

Welcome to Obamanomics, a sect of the Keynesian denomination of Cargo Cult Economics.

[...]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/calderwood/calderwood24.html

We have already seen Cargo Cult behavior in the form of UFO cults and the absurd designs for man made flying discs that totally misunderstand the principles of real UFOs.

This Cargo Cult effect in economics is directly related to the ostrich posturing surrounding UFOs as detailed in the excellent paper ‘UFOs, Sovereignty and Politics‘(PDF). There is a developing taboo against saying that allowing the free marked to solve problems is the best way to ‘organize’ the economy. We can see some of this effect in this CNN clip. It doesn’t seem to matter to the presenters and the delusional german that the Austrians have been right for decades and that they have a complete theory of economics that can not only predict the future but offer real solutions; these ideas are to be irrationally marginalized for purely psychological reasons based around mostly around pity and a poorly thought out desire to help their fellow man.

I am daily astounded by the amazing ignorance of the pundits and ‘experts’ when it comes to economics. It is not just a matter of philosophy, but a profound lack of knowledge about the fundamentals. The worst offenders are the people at CNN and MSNBC who are not only clueless, but who are actually hostile to the facts.

In the end, everyone must come to the same conclusion, wether the subject be economics or UFOs; there is only one reality, and we are all faced with it wether we like it or not. Your choice as a rational human being should be to face the facts and then deal with them whatever they may be.

These three videos go together.

Do you know why?

In the age of ‘teh inernetz’ it is always a safe bet that someone, somewhere, is thinking the same thing that you are thinking.

It seems that the Lakota Sioux have taken the initiative and are starting a clean, no fractional reserve, no Federal Reserve Note bank. The word about this is spreading like wildfire; this is because everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that the only real money is Gold, Silver and other precious metals, and that Fractional Reserve Banking is fundamentally immoral and a form of legalize counterfeiting and that the best sort of bank for your savings would be one that only held gold that you deposited.

Consent of the Governed does the hard work:

Remember my blogpost about the Liberty Dollar? Those are still available – but now the People of Lakota are launching a Private Bank for Only Silver and Gold Currencies; and you can convert your US Dollars for their Gold and Silver. You don’t even have to be an honorary Sioux to participate.

In a stunning development, the Free & Independent People of Lakota announced today the introduction of the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that accepts only silver and gold currencies for deposit.

“Today is a great day for us, a day that we begin to exercise our rights as a sovereign people with strength and pride,” comments Canupa Gluha Mani, Tetuwan Council Judicial Member of the Cante Tenza “Strong Heart” Warrior Society. Mani’s 2500 member warrior society has contracted to provide private security services for the Free Lakota Bank.

“We invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.” Mani, also known as Duane Martin Sr, is a member of the delegation that declared Lakota independence on December 17th, 2007.The Free Lakota Bank issues an American Open Currency Standard Approved currency, making it readily accepted for trade by over 10,000 merchants and businesses across the continent; this is similar to the Liberty Dollar.

The announcement about this also mentioned that:

The launch of the Free Lakota Bank is also an incredible victory for StrikeForce Technologies, the access control experts providing depositor Out-of-Band Authentication. As the Free Lakota Bank does not require a name, photo identification or social security number to transact, StrikeForce’s technology met the challenge of limiting fraud without requiring controversial biometric technology.

They are using some security software for deposits and withdrawals, and since people have become used to doing banking online even with institutions that don’t have physical “branches” like ING, this is nothing new.

It looks like the Native Americans are flexing their position of sovereignty to create gold and silver backed currency – I sure wish the United States would do the same. Instead the US is just printing up gobs of fiat money that shows signs of eventual collapse. I’ll bet the Lakota’s website and phones will be very busy.

The People of Lakota invite depositors to establish accounts and invest in the Free Lakota Bank’s General Investment Fund, the fund it uses to develop profitable free-market enterprise inside Lakota territory. Mani comments that the nation despises donations and charity, and instead insists instead on “earning our wealth by creating value for those that place their faith and trust in our system.”

Let’s hope that the Feds don’t raid them and steal all their Gold and Silver like they did to the Liberty Dollar folks.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion…when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing…when you see your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you…when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice…you may know that your society is doomed.” – Ayn Rand – “Atlas Shrugged”

[...]

Consent Of The Governed

If the Lakota Sioux are indeed a sovereign people, then the Feds cannot go there and raid this bank. What they might do however, is order a Gold and Silver confiscation, and make it illegal for you to take your money off of Lakota Sioux land. We shall see.

I do not think that this will be the first bank of this kind. The more people wake up, the greater the demand will be for a no Fractional Reserve bank that keeps your savings in something other than Federal Reserve Notes.

I have to read their privacy page. If they keep your affairs 100% private no matter what, then they have ‘the total package’.

Let’s start with a superb essay by Lew Rockwell:

The Myth of Good Government

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

One of the great and most persistent errors of classical liberals is to believe in “good government,” a government that does “what it is supposed to do.”

There is nothing the state can do, which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market. Another point that is just as telling: no state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate.

Sometimes the point is easier to see when looking at foreign governments, such as the tragic case of China. The government is embarking on an explosive venture to dump $586 billion into “infrastructure” over two years. The reason is the classic Keynesian excuse: the spending is needed to stimulate investment. Never mind that this trick has never worked in all of human history. This is instead a grand plan to loot the private sector on behalf of the Communist Party, which will then spend the money bolstering its power.

No country knows more about the failures of this type of central planning than China. Every form of collectivism has been tried out on these poor souls, and tens of millions lost their lives in the course of Mao’s insane collectivist experiments. That this new plan is being enacted in the name of Lord Keynes rather than Karl Marx is irrelevant. The effects are the same: expand power and reduce liberty.

China’s recovery from communism is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of economic development. The country went from being a suffering and impoverished land of catastrophe to being modernized in just 15 years. The state shrunk in scope nearly by default as the private sector grew and grew. This wasn’t the plan. It was the de facto result of the new tolerance of free economic activity. The state went into protective mode to keep its power, and did nothing to stop the swell of private enterprise. The result was glorious.

Keep in mind this critical point. China’s restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence. The fact that the state did not intervene led to prosperity. Again, it wasn’t a policy or a constitution or a law that made the difference. There was no switch from a communist-style government to a night-watchman state. Because the state abandoned its posts under public opposition and contempt, society could flourish.

But the state never went away. It’s just that its depredations have been spotty and unpredictable. Had history taken a better course, the central state would have melted away completely, and law would have devolved to the most local levels. Sadly for the Chinese, the state persisted in its old structure, even as the private sector grew and grew. The state still had its hand in the large industries such as steel and energy, and, of course, it controlled the banking sector.

The government never became good (an impossibility). It was and is bad. It was just less bad than in the past because it did less. But all states lie in wait for a crisis. The earthquake in the southwest provided one great excuse for intervention. But nothing except war compares with an economic crisis as a great excuse for state expansion. Chinese officials can count on support from Western “experts” here, and the thoroughly disgusting US response to our own economic downturn has provided an awful model for the world. Think of it: the Communist Party in China is now citing the US as the main reason for its plot to loot the private sector and bolster its own power at the expense of the country.

So much for being a beacon of liberty in a dark world! Instead, the US is helping to shut out the lights and bolster decrepit despotisms. This is surely one of the great ironies of the current political moment. Instead of teaching the world about liberty, the US’s newly empowered unitary executive is christening various forms of dictatorship.

There can be no question that China’s spending will not improve economic growth. It will instead extract $586 billion from the private sector and spend on political priorities. Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. It must come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government’s spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, it will be wasted.

But won’t the spending spur investment? It can create local boomlets, but they will be temporary. To the extent that the new spending causes a spending response from investors and consumers, this is more evidence of an uneconomic use of scarce resources. If the money is used to prop up failing companies, that’s particularly bad since it is an attempt to override market realities, an attempt that is about as successful as trying to repeal gravity by throwing things up in the air.

The nature of the state – and the core of its rationale for existence – is the conviction that it stands apart from and above society, to correct the failings of the market and individuals. A presumption of superiority is at the very claim of the state, whether it is minimal or totalitarian. Who is to say when and where it should intervene? Well, think about it. If the state is inherently wiser than and superior to society, standing in judgment over what is working and what is not working, the state alone is also in a position to decide when it should intervene.

No government is liberal by nature, said Ludwig von Mises. This is the great lesson that people who advocate “limited government” have never learned. If you give the government any jobs to do, it will presume the right to police its own conduct and then inevitably abuse its power. That is true in China and it is true in the US.

It was the science of economics that first discovered the radical incapacity of the state to make any improvements in the social order. It turns science on its head to invoke economics as a reason for the government to loot and pillage in the name of “stimulating investment.” Stimulation here, there, and everywhere amounts to a diminution of freedom, security of property, and prosperity.

Keynes famously praised Nazi economic policies in the introduction to the German edition of his worst book, the General Theory. After a century of horrors, free men and women, in China, the US, and the world surely deserve better.

[...]

Lew Rockwell

Fascinating and true.

If China can turn itself around in 15 years and the state shrink in scope nearly by default, and if banking is the last and most important bastion of state control, what could we expect if the resourceful Chinese adopt a private currency on a large scale?

There would be nothing that the state could do without destroying the economy if the currency was spread quickly and widely enough.

The question is how should such a currency be designed and rapidly deployed?

It would have to be some form of precious metal in denominations that made it practical for many types of transaction, from small groceries to buying a car.

In the past the wealthy of China used ingots:

and of course, the peasants used many different types of coin:

Chinese bronze coin from the Han Dynasty

and look at these coins, with their tamper evident edges:

And this is pretty…sorry, just had to throw it in:

Essentially, you need a mint, to think about the denominations and then to distribute the coins and bullion. It would be a good idea to get hundreds of millions of people to use vast amounts of low denomination gold coins; then by exchange, certain individuals, probably shop owners, would start to accumulate large numbers of coins.

Thinking about it, that is absolutely the way to seed a new economy that runs on a private currency; many small coins whose value goes up to, say the equivalent of a €500 note, spread to as many individuals as possible, so that daily exchange is made as easy as possible for everything from a bowl of noodles to a bicycle.

This brilliant piece by Lew Rockwell is well timed. Some people are organizing demonstrations outside every Federal Reserve building to ‘End The Fed’. These people haven’t got a hope in hell of ending the Federal Reserve system if all they have in their arsenal are the discredited tactics of the twentieth century.

They correctly identify the Federal Reserve as the cause of many ills and the recent crash; what they do not understand is the true nature of the force that should operate to control interest rates in absentia of central banks. The Market.

If they understood the true the power of the market, they would try and harness it directly to end the Fed, and not protest like beggars asking for oatmeal in the poor house. If they understood anything at all about problem solving they would never opt to demonstrate. Readers of BLOGDIAL know the truth about demonstrating.

If they want to solve this problem, they need to attack it directly. That means attacking the Federal Reserve Notes by issuing their own private currency, and then using it for all their transactions. There are difficulties in doing this, and one of them is Gresham’s Law:

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gresham’s law

Observation that “bad money drives out good.” It is named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519 – 1579), financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I, who was one of the first to elucidate it (he had been preceded by Copernicus). The meaning expressed is that, if two coins have the same face value but are made from metals of unequal value, the cheaper will tend to drive the other out of circulation; the more valuable coin will be hoarded or used for foreign exchange instead of for domestic transactions.

If that law is true, then issuing a private currency made of gold will have difficulty driving out Federal Reserve Notes. Hmmmmmm.

Small digression.

With the internet, it should be possible to distribute a private physical currency everywhere in a very short amount of time, and to spread information about it virally.

While we are at it, Obama wants to shut down internet payment systems that he does not like:

Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit: Barack Obama will shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Barack Obama will also initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.

[...]

Barack Obama

“shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes” means shutting down any payment system that does not allow back door automatic surveillance. Obviously. It means more laws to meddle in our internetz; laws that will inevitably have spill-over into things other than ‘payment systems’.

Another small digression.

Other private currency vendors (Mints) would no doubt spring up with their own coins, adding to the choices and flexibility.

Either way, you will not stop the bailouts, stop the war machine, or end the Federal Reserve if you do not have control of the money. A private currency is not going to appear from nowhere by magic; someone has to design it properly and release it, and according to this post on mises.org, the Liberty Dollar is not what it should look like:

Silver

As a student of Austrian Economics and supporter of commodity money, I regard the assault upon the American Liberty Dollar (ALD) with alarm and sadness, but not surprise.

While nothing the ALD firm did was clearly criminal, in that no force or overt fraud was used, their tactics could charitably be described as sleazy. They were designed to trade silver medallions to the ignorant and unwary at premiums that were many multiples of the market norm. In doing so, they created unnecessary complexity and confusion about hard money.

Consider:
1) Appropriating the face of Ron Paul without so much as asking his permission. Yes, he is a public figure so the appropriation will not be considered criminal, but it is feels sleazy.

2) Erecting a multilevel marketing scheme that provides profits that have at times exceeded 100% to insiders. The tale (face value) of the ALD was raised from $10 to $20 when the market price for an ounce of silver crossed $7.50. ALD dealers split the $12+ profit with the ALD firm. I am not against profits, I seek them. But I know where I can buy 1 ozt silver medallions, including ALDs, at less than $1 over spot silver. Only the ignorant pay such exorbitant prices for silver coins.

3) Creating confusion and needless complexity by marking their coins with a dollar-denominated tale. Unlike countless other silver coins with tales denominated in STU (silver trade unit), WTU, Sovereign, or simply weight, the ALD was denominated in dollars, a figure reserved to government-issued, primarily US and Canadian, currencies.

Mises himself taught, in The Theory of Money and Credit “…at all times and among all peoples the principal coins have been tendered and accepted, not by tale without consideration of their quantity and quality, but only as pieces of metal of specific degrees of weight and fineness. Where coins have been accepted by tale, this has always been in the definite belief that the stamp showed them to be of the usual fineness of their kind and of the correct weight. Where there were no grounds for this assumption, weighing and testing were resorted to again.
…
Nevertheless, in defiance of all official regulations and prohibitions and fixing of prices and threats of punishment, commercial practice has always insisted that what has to be considered in valuing coins is not their face value but their value as metal. The value of a coin has always been determined, not by the image and superscription it bears nor by the proclamation of the mint and market authorities, but by its metal content. Not every kind of money has been accepted at sight, but only those kinds with a good reputation for weight and fineness.”

4) Exploiting the self-made confusion of the tale by crowing about the “doubling” of the ALD when they changed the tale from 10 to 20 “dollars” per ozt. “Immediately all Liberty Dollars, in specie, paper and digital forms DOUBLED. If you had Liberty Dollars before the Move Up you profited because the underlying commodity increased in value. If you had digital, your eLD doubled the next day. If you had paper Silver Certificates, you could redeem them for the new $20 Silver Libertys. If you had Silver Liberty in specie form, you were offered a special re-minting rate to exchange them for new $20 Silver Libertys.” Liberty Dollar Doubles

Of course, nothing had changed, 1 ozt of silver remained 1 ozt of silver, and by marking their coins in “dollars” they were caught in the inflation of FRNs. Few “$10″ ALDs were actually re-minted; they now circulate with all other silver medallions, currently at premiums of $0.60 to $1 over spot in small quantities (1 to 500 coins).

5) Slander of Walmart (big firm in Bentonville) and the implication that competing silver medallions are not pure in The Liberty Dollar Merchant Script.

6) Note also in that document the multiple referrals to “local business referral currency.” The appeal is to autarky rather than free commerce, with more slander to the effect that “big box retailers are in bed with the big bankers.”

The ultimate argument of the ALD firm boils down to this: A number stamped on an ounce of silver changes its value, and so determines whether it will or will not circulate. The explicit assumption is that “average” people are too stupid to know that a Liberty mint or A-mark 1 ozt silver coin with no dollar figure stamped on it and a norfed ALD with some fictional number of “dollars” stamped on it are really and truly the same thing: 1 ozt of fine silver with markings to prove that fact. Period.

The arrogant conceit that most people are too stupid to understand weight of metal without the assistance of a self-proclaimed “monetary architect” is breathtaking. History and present-day practice shows that always and everywhere precious metal coins are valued by weight and fineness (purity) with minor adjustments for being widely recognized, particularly beautiful, or other characteristics.

The aggressive tactics created by the ALD firm and taught to ALD dealers were designed to fool the unwary into believing that an ounce of silver was worth far more than the free market price. Indeed, some ALD dealers vehemently defend the large premiums attached to their products. In at least some cases, ALDs were passed to unsuspecting clerks with a casual “Oh, that’s the new twenty dollar coin.” Owners and managers discovered the deciet in the till only after the dealer was long gone. These tactics caused an increasing number in inquiries to government agencies, district attorneys, and police. It was not successful competition with FRNs that killed the ALD, it was attracting the attention of government agents with methods that had the look and feel of a scam.

The ALD firm did not deserve to be shut down, but if commodity money ever makes a return, it will do so in spite of ALD-created confusion and without multilevel marketing profit margins. In the happy future where silver and gold coins are used in daily commerce, the markups associated with minting and distributing the coins will fall to their historical norms of a few percent over melt value.

[...]

The Liberty Dollar Question – Mises Economics Blog

Clearly there are a substantial number of people with sufficient knowledge to design a optimal currency to replace Federal Reserve Notes, and there is a demand for this service that will only grow stronger as the value of everyone’s savings starts to evaporate at an ever greater pace thanks to the heat of inflation boiling away the value of the dollar.

We wrote before about the Totnes Pound; there is a demand for clean money not only in the USA but in Great Britain.

The question I have is, who is going to be the one to put their fortune into launching a private currency? What sort of person are we looking for? It seems to me that a Mark Shuttleworth type is the most likely candidate; someone who has been made aware of these problems and the solution and who will see in themselves a beneficial instrument of liberation:

This is not the end of capitalism

Some of the comments on my last post on the economic unwinding of 2008 suggested that people think we are witnessing the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new socialist era.

I certainly hope not.

I think a world without regulated capitalism would be a bleak one indeed. I had the great privilege to spend a year living in Russia in 2001/2002, and the visible evidence of the destruction wrought by central planning was still very much present. We are all ultimately human, with human failings, whether we work for a state planning agency or a private company, and those failings have consequences either way. To think that moving all private enterprise into state hands will somehow create a panacea of efficiency and sustainability is to ignore the stark lessons of the 20th century.

The leaders and decision makers in a centrally-planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one – they would probably be the same people! But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy – state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail. And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse. It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant. The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly. Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.

[...]

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/227

In fact, Mark Shuttleworth is a PERFECT candidate, as we can see. He just doesn’t know it yet.

In case you didn’t know, Mark Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist genius billionaire who single handedly accelerated the adoption of Linux and put it into the hands of the masses with Ubuntu. I say single handedly because he financed it by himself; where other distributions were getting better and better slowly like Fedora, Mark Shuttleworth took the Debian distribution and turned it into something that anyone anywhere could use by pouring money, philosophy and hard work onto Debian. The result has been a complete success, and now Ubuntu is being sold on Dell laptops as standard.

There are not many capitalists who understand the Open Source business model and its associated philosophies. Just look at the irrational buggy whip thinking of the music and film industry to hear what ordinary, unintelligent business people think about making money from giving away something for free.

The right man for this job would understand scale. He would understand networks, both internet and real world. He would be driven by philosophy as much as the desire to make money. He would understand the philosophy behind the Free Software movement. He would also have a grasp of banking and how currencies work. He would be able to apply and to synthesize all of this into a project to spread debt free, central banking free currency that is owned by and for the benefit of the public…just like Ubuntu is.

I could not think of a better time to launch such a project; the dollar is collapsing, the headless chickens of the G20 are all jockeying around for a ’solution’. What better time to checkmate them all with the release of a new, private currency that trumps them all, into which everyone can convert their savings and buy their bread with.

Now that would be something worth while!

by Paul Joseph Watson

The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions – all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”
“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

The George Washington blog has compiled a list of quotes attesting to Celente’s accuracy as a trend forecaster.

“When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” — CNN Headline News

“A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties.”
— The Economist

“Gerald Celente has a knack for getting the zeitgeist right.” — USA Today

“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
- CNBC

“Those who take their predictions seriously … consider the Trends Research Institute.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark … he’s one of the most accurate forecasters around.”— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.”
— The New York Times

“Mr. Celente is a very intelligent guy. We are able to learn about trends from an authority.”
— 48 Hours, CBS News

“Gerald Celente has a solid track record. He has predicted everything from the 1987 stock market crash and the demise of the Soviet Union to green marketing and corporate downsizing.”
— The Detroit News

“Gerald Celente forecast the 1987 stock market crash, ‘green marketing,’ and the boom in gourmet coffees.” — Chicago Tribune

“The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of Popular Culture.”
— The Los Angeles Times

“If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”
— New York Post

So there you have it – hardly a nutjob conspiracy theorist blowhard now is he? The price of not heeding his warnings will be far greater than the cost of preparing for the future now. Storable food and gold are two good places to make a start.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=5938

Gordon Brown has made his biggest mistake ever.

He has branded Iceland a terrorist nation, causing all transfers of money in and out of that country to dry up:

LONDON — No one disputes that Iceland’s economic troubles are largely the country’s own fault. But there may be more to the story, at least in the view of Iceland’s government, its citizens and even some outsiders. As grave as their situation already was, they say, Britain — their old friend, NATO ally and trading partner — made it immeasurably worse.

The troubles between the countries began three weeks ago when Britain took the extraordinary step of using its 2001 antiterrorism laws to freeze the British assets of a failing Icelandic bank. That appeared to brand Iceland a terrorist state.

“I must admit that I was absolutely appalled,” the Icelandic foreign minister, Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, said in an interview, describing her horror at opening the British treasury department’s home page at the time and finding Iceland on a list of terrorist entities with Al Qaeda, Sudan and North Korea, among others.

In a volatile economic climate, in which appearance matters almost as much as reality, being associated with terrorism is not a good thing.

“The immediate effect was to trigger an almost complete freeze on any banking transactions between Iceland and abroad,” said Jon Danielsson, an economist at the London School of Economics. “When you’re labeled a terrorist, nobody does business with you.”

The Icelandic prime minister, Geir H. Haarde, accused Britain of “bullying a small neighbor” and said the action was “very out of proportion.” In a recent speech in Beijing, Sir Howard Davies, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England and now the director of the London School of Economics, said that Britain had used a “beggar thy neighbor” approach to Iceland.

[...]

New York Times

Amazing.

Firstly, when someone stabs you in the face with a knife, you do not sit down and say that you ‘absolutely appalled’. You’ve got to get mad. You have to say, “I am a human being my life has value!”

Gordon Brown and Alister Darling have committed a crime by falsely listing that bank as a terrorist organization and freezing their assets. The entire Icelandic economy is suffering because of this action.

By deliberately bringing this calamity on the people of Iceland, they have comitted the crime of Collective Punishment:

Collective punishment is the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment to retaliate against and deter attacks on their forces by resistance movements (e.g. by destroying whole villages where attacks have taken place).

[...]

The term is also used to describe confiscation of assets connected with drug use and trafficking or otherwise connected with organized crime in the United States[citation needed]. More recently the U.S. Army has been accused of practicing collective punishment in Iraq [4].

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment

Now.

If I were a member of the Icelandic government, I would put out a statement thusly:

“Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Aliester Darling have falsely and maliciously listed one of our banks as a terrorist organization in order to freeze the assets of that bank. This action has caused all money transfers in and out of Iceland to stop, causing the entire country to be damaged and the entire Icelendic population to suffer.

We will not be falsely labeled as terrorists by anyone, and we will not have our economy destroyed and our citizens harmed by the actions of these reckless and lawless men.”

Its one thing to murder and abuse uneducated middle easterners; doing this sort of thing to Europeans is quite another. Or at least, thats the way it SHOULD be, and Iceland would most certainly win such a legal action.

It would mean that the nation of Iceland would be in line for huge reparations and compensation. It would be enough to not only compensate every Icelander, but to pay back the deposits of the British who had kept money with their banks (should they feel generous enough to return the money).

THAT ‘my friends’, is how you respond to such a violent, absurd and insulting action.

If the government of Iceland doesn’t have the balls to do it, the 73,596 people who have signed the petition at this site:

http://www.indefence.is/?pageid=545

Should mount a class action lawsuit, starting by paying €100 each into a fund to hire a crack team of lawyers to get the job done.

What you DO NOT do, put pictures of yourself up onto the internet, protest, demonstrate or do anything like that, thinking that that is going to solve anything. Its good for PR, but little else. Gordon Brown is a man who would mass murder millions of Iraqis for money. Any protest you could possibly launch would not be as great as the demonstration against the Iraq invasion in Britain, which achieved absolutely nothing. You know all about this since you read BLOGDIAL:

[...]

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.

[...]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=739

The only way to attack these people (in this case) is through the international law. A humiliating judgement against Gordon Brown and Darling, along with an astronomical reparations and compensation bill would be pure justice for the Icelandic people, a warning that ‘terrorism’ laws are now discredited and woe betide anyone who uses them incorrectly, or even has them on their statues.

Finally, perhaps to energize the Icelandic people, the magical Björk could do a cover of the Slits’s ‘Number One Enemy’!!!

The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.

The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:

• “The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”

• “Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ’self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
• “‘America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,’ chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
• “Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis….”
• “It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”[1]

Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus, one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”[2] Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”[3] In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”[4] Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”

The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire” — at least compared to the time of Stalin.

Laissez-faire capitalism has a definite meaning, which is totally ignored, contradicted, and downright defiled by such statements as those quoted above. Laissez-faire capitalism is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual’s rights against the initiation of physical force. This protection applies to the initiation of physical force by other private individuals, by foreign governments, and, most importantly, by the individual’s own government. This last is accomplished by such means as a written constitution, a system of division of powers and checks and balances, an explicit bill of rights, and eternal vigilance on the part of a citizenry with the right to keep and bear arms. Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.

The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States:

1. Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.
2. There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez-faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.
3. The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.
4. To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.

5. And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.

What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.

Government Intervention Actually Responsible for the Crisis

Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired.

The Federal Reserve and other portions of the government pursue the policy of money and credit creation in everything they do that encourages and protects private banks in the attempt to cheat reality by making it appear that one can keep one’s money and lend it out too, both at the same time. This duplicity occurs when individuals or business firms deposit cash in banks, which they can continue to use to make purchases and pay bills by means of writing checks rather than using currency. To the extent that the banks are then enabled and encouraged to lend out the funds that have been deposited in this way (usually by the creation of new and additional checking deposits rather than the lending of currency), they are engaged in the creation of new and additional money. The depositors continue to have their money and borrowers now have the bulk of the funds deposited. In recent years, the Federal Reserve has so encouraged this process, that checking deposits have been created equal to fifty times the actual cash reserves of the banks, a situation more than ripe for implosion.

[...]

http://mises.org/story/3165

Lew Rockwell has posted a simply wonderful article about ‘Joe the plumber’:

Joe the Outlaw

This whole campaign has been dreadfully boring, with gaffe-avoidance techniques squelching all spontaneity, and it doesn’t help that the ideological parameters of the election have been so narrowly drawn as to make any thinking person want to shut up both the candidates and the media that cover them so lovingly.

Still, one interesting point has emerged: the archetype chosen to represent mainstream America turns out to be a thorough-going outlaw in the best sense of that term. In this, he is a symbol of the age. We can look forward to the creation and emergence of ever more people like this in the coming years, as the state tightens its grip over every aspect of American life. We will all soon be outlaws.

The whole Joe the Plumber saga began when Joe Wurzelbacher from Toledo, Ohio, confronted Barack Obama about the candidate’s tax plans. He wanted to know if Obama would raise his taxes. In particular, he was planning to buy a company with a revenue of $250,000 per year. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Of course the Republicans seized on this and exploited it. McCain keeps bringing him up in speeches. Republicans like to talk about taxes. They always seem to corner the budget-balancing, wealth-distributing Democrats with this topic, even though it is largely a distraction in an age of fiat money when the government can print all the revenue it needs. Still, the GOP likes the symbolism, so Joe had his 15 minutes of fame as a hero of the Right.

But the New York Times did some digging and discovered – horror – that Joe is doing plumbing without a proper business license. How dare he call himself a plumber! A license is required by Toledo, not just one license for a partnership but for everyone who is called a plumber. Joe has not taken the training courses, is not a member of the union, and cannot legally call himself a plumber.

The press reports on this were explosive, with reporters speaking as if they had caught this guy red-handed and completely discredited him. But what about the complete absurdity of the idea that you have to have a license in order to have the right to fix someone else’s sink? This is Soviet like, but deeply entrenched in American professional life.

The idea of licensing is that it assures quality standards. But this is just a cover used by guilds since the Middle Ages. The real goal of licensing is to create a professional cartel. Fewer providers means higher wages for those with licenses. It is all about boosting income by restricting competition. This is of course a violation of human rights because it impinges on the fundamental freedom of association.

In a market setting, there are plenty of quality controls through professional organizations. Consumers are free to use them or not. Many private producers attempt to create cartels through this means, but it is rarely successful. There are always producers who break with the guild in order to charge lower prices for their services. This is why they often seek state regulations, such as the requirement that all plumbers have a license.

By the way, this is true of all professions, including lawyering and doctoring. There was a time when entry into these fields was governed by the free market, and the system worked fine (contrary to legend). But the big players in these industries sought and obtained state privileges to officially license service providers. It was an income-boosting tactic and it worked.

By practicing plumbing without a license, Joe is bucking the system in a truly heroic way. He shouldn’t be condemned for this. He should be celebrated as a freedom fighter. He has a lot more to complain about than just taxes. It is the state itself in all its incarnations that is his true enemy. He ought to demanding answers from the politicians about their regulatory schemes to further restrict competition in a wide range of areas (banking for example!).

Most ridiculous is the idea that he shouldn’t be called a plumber because he doesn’t have a license. Here we see how licensing attacks even the use of our language. If he is doing plumbing, he is a plumber. Period.

And yet taxes are also close to Joe’s heart because it also turns out that he is delinquent on his property taxes, which are similarly too high and similarly unjust. The Ohio Department of Taxation placed a lien against him because $1,183 in personal property taxes had not been paid. In what sense can you say that you really own your home if the state can take it away if you don’t pay what the state says you ought to be pay? This is an attack on private property in the most fundamental sense.

So it turns out that we truly do have an American archetype in Joe Wurzelbacher. He is an outlaw in the same sense that our founders were outlaws. He lives outside the regulations of the state because these regulations attack his freedom and property. It was to end systems such as this that the American revolution came to be. And yet we find ourselves back in exactly the same system, and one incredibly worse in every way.

It is going to take something different from the election of the Republican to beat back the oppressions that vex his life. It is not complicated. It is a right belonging to all people that they can do what they want and keep what they own provided they do not impinge on anyone else’s right to do the same. The state is nothing but an organized attempt to deny this right. Joe has an enemy, but it goes way beyond Obama.

[...]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/joe-the-outlaw.html

Needless to say, I agree 100% with all of this.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

What does it look like in a country where everyone hates the state?

It looks like Spain.

I was told a story two days ago about buying property in Spain by a builder. It went like this.

He was buying a house. Everything in Spain has to be Notarized meaning essentially that the state is a third party in all important transactions.

When it came to the day of the sale, the builders lawyers, the sellers lawyers, the builder and the seller were all sat in a lawyer’s office in Seville. The contracts were laid out. The Notary came in, and read the details of the contract, including the price to be paid, signed and stamped it and then left the room. What happened next is the extraordinary part.

Apparently in Spain, when people sell property, the price quoted is always significantly lower than the real price that is to be paid. The difference is made up by a cash payment on the day of the hand-over.

Everyone knows about this illegal activity.

The lawyers know about it.
The banks know about it.
The Notaries know about it.

EVERYONE in Spain knows about it, EVERYONE does it and no one bats an eyelid because they are ALL, UNANIMOUSLY AGAINST THE STATE with an equal and total hatred.

In essence, the state in Spain is partially ignored by the entire population, who seem to have reached a bizarre equilibrium where they all offset the insane taxes and duties imposed by the state by always doing a proportion of business transactions in cash. That every legal and banking professional knows about it and participates in openly it shows that civil society in Spain is a façade.

You would think that digital money would sound the death knell for this parallel economy, but you would be wrong. Because the entire population is doing this, the lawyers, judges, police, bankers, accountants…EVERYONE, no matter what system of control the state tries to put in, no one will be there to enforce it.

The Spanish it would appear (from this story in any case) to have partially woken up from the hypnotic state many people are under, where they falsely believe that the state is all powerful. As I have said many times on BLOGDIAL, all it takes is everyone to simply not obey for the state to completely lose power. And for all you terrified children out there, the state losing power does not mean the collapse of everything and total disorder; it simply means that they are out of your life, and everything gets done without without them.

The Italians are well on their way to this situation if we take the stories of unregulated restaurants running in private houses; opening and running a restaurant is so fraught with difficulties, taxes, regulations, duties, health and safety rules, inspections and all manner of nonsense that only an insane person would comply with any of it. Some people it seems, comply with none of it, and run restaurants from their own homes where you get everything that a restaurant gives you, but inside someone’s house. They pay nothing, are inspected by no one, make good money, mind their business…

and the sky does not fall down.

If the state will not back down, then it will end up being ignored and made irrelevant as people simply wake up and refuse to be exploited.