Almost Daily Rant

The Latest Chapter of the Global Corporate Takeover

Even if you subscribe to the “accidental” view of history (i.e. stuff just happens with some black swans along the way), you cannot deny the decades long push towards a carefully managed consolidation of global economic and political power. In Marshall’s latest article, he describes the evolution in plain sight of the G20 as power centralizes, as it always does, under the opportunity of crisis.

In May of 2010, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, stated that, “crisis is an opportunity,” and called for “a new global currency issued by a global central bank, with robust governance and institutional features,” and that the “global central bank could also serve as a lender of last resort.” However, he stated, “I fear we are still very far from that level of global collaboration.”[1] Well, perhaps not so far as it might seem.

       
The notion of global governance has taken an evolutionary path to the present day, with the principle global political and economic actors and institutions incrementally constructing the apparatus of a global government. In the modern world, global governance is an inter-lapping, intersecting, and intertwined web of international organizations, think tanks, multinational corporations, nations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, military alliances, intelligence agencies, banks and interest groups. Globalization – a term which was popularized in the late 1980s to refer to the global spread of multinational corporations – has laid the principle ideological and institutional foundations for this process. Global social, economic and political integration do not occur at an equal pace; rather, economic integration and governance on a global level has and will continue to be ahead of the other sectors of human social interaction, in both the pace and degree of integration. In short, global economic governance will set the pace for social and political global governance to follow. (Read Full Article)

Another Look at Inflation

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose. -John Maynard Keynes

 

As we enter another economic inflection point, the global currency crisis and murmuring of massive inflation is getting more ink in the mainstream. Everybody knows that every debtor nation’s central bank is working overtime to default through devaluation of the currency. When you’re on the hook for tens of trillions in bond repayments, entitlements and interest with no real hope of making good,  then of course your goal is to pay those obligations in the future with much cheaper money. At the same time, you rob from creditors and savers starved by artificially low interest rates with pushing them to plunge their eroding funds into the (P&DCM 500) Pump-and-Dump Casino Markets thinking it is better to buy expensive companies at low yields than bankrupted government promises. Of course the negative impacts of inflation fly in the face of the constant central bank mantra to inflate at all costs.

Now that “everybody” knows we’re doing to dive head first into massive inflation, you still have a full set of deflationary forces at work including a foreclosure/contracts/MERS freeze threatening 10’s of Trillions in debt instruments, China, loss of incomes, the Internet, unemployment and a massive government debt bubble due to governments and central banks assuming mountains of private debt since 2008. But this is all window dressing for the ultimate con:

That the currency itself is debt and that any talk of paying down the debt is foolish because from the onset of issuing an interest-bearing debt-based currency, you ensure that there will never be enough currency in existence to repay the principle plus interest.

Since the financial collapse, Charles Smith has made some good arguments on why 10's of trillions in asset deflation can defeat the most aggressive central bank policies, but makes some critical distinctions between inflation and currency devaluation in his Hyperinflation Is a Political Process essay. These points are worth emphasizing.

He brings up the key difference between purely fiat and credit-based currency systems, a point that often gets lost in the constant printing press banter where the implications of debt as currency get lost sometimes. So yes, we need to be careful to distinguish between "too much money chasing too few goods" and the amount of credit in the system, since credit can be a case of pushing on a string if no one borrows in a fractional reserve system. In other words, you can’t force people to take loans, BUT you can continue to destroy the currency.

The end result for most folks is that each Federal Reserve Note (FRN) gets you less of what you need because commodities act like a sink for a credit source that refuses to expand, at the same time that each FRN gets harder to come by for loss of income as a result of the deflationary effect of no "money" expansion.

While I couldn’t agree more than we need to end the Fed, against what promises to be a chaotic political backdrop on the ashes of God only knows what type of social and economic turmoil we'll be facing several more years down the road,we need to make sure the new devil we create isn’t worse than the old devil from Jekyll Island that we’ve known since 1913. If you end the Fed, but don’t end the fractional reserve debt-based currency system, you have accomplished nothing. Inevitably, the result would be that power would only be nominally transferred to another Keynesian Creature under the thumb of the same financial elite IMF/BIS establishment promising to bring an order from chaos.

When you talk of a true national central bank, as the expression goes, you must be careful what you wish for. A true central bank is a lesser of two evils because you can’t have sovereignty without control of the money supply. As it stands, we have financial tyranny of the oligarchs (“give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws”) and what Alexis de Tocqueville referred to as tyranny of the majority through politicians pressured for entitlements, bread and circus. In theory, a central bank helps with the first matter, but not the second. It is still politically convenient to print money instead of tax.

The only certainty is that any instrument of government financial power will be compromised by the financial elite and abused by politicos in the same ways they always have been, so new powers must be limited. If and when we do End the Fed, Congressional monetary control should remain limited, the Legal Tender laws should be repelled freeing up private parties to except other forms of payment, 100% reserve requirements be required, Federal Reserve Notes should be relegated to a government script (e.g. tax payments) and legitimate Constitutional definition for Dollar be re-established.

Death of Contracts in a Banana Republic

One of the requirements for a functional society is each person has the assumption that another person will in general do what he agrees he will do, forming the basis of contract law. Ideally, a written contract would be nothing more than a formality after two parties make a verbal agreement, but in a litigious society like our own, the written contract rules. Once enough people lose confidence in that basic assumption, the ground beneath society gives way and you have a banana republic.

That said the current contract and foreclosure debacle are causing many to do just that in the US. As more former middle class reach the conclusion that the game is rigged, their belief in the system fades, and many such as the middle class couple in this Zerohedge article reach the point of saying ‘f-it’.

What’s really important is that law-abiding middle-class citizens are deciding that playing by the rules is nothing but a sucker’s game. 

Just like the poker player who’s been fleeced by all the other players, and gets one mean attitude once he finally wakes up to the con?

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.
 
TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.
 
If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy. 

Brian and Ilsa are such anarchists—grey-haired, well-dressed, golf-loving, well-to-do, exceedingly polite anarchists: But anarchists nevertheless. They are not important, or powerful, or influential: They are average—that’s why they’re so deadly: Their numbers are millions. And they are slowly, painfully coming to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it anymore.

The implications on the housing market are huge as clear title forming the basis of property ownership comes into question as described in this Whiskey and Gunpowder article.

Well, if borrowers challenge foreclosure proceedings, and if banks (as they have already begun to do) halt foreclosure proceedings nationwide, the process of establishing a market-clearing price in the U.S. house market is frozen. Buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell if the ownership of the underlying collateral — the house itself — is in doubt. What sane person would enter a market like this with prices effectively having completely broken down?

CHS sums the larger context in a mortgage market that is for all intents and purposes already completely owned by the government. In a banana republic, government outwardly becomes nothing more than a legitimized crime syndicate that loots the public on behalf of the cronies behind it.

Either there is due process of law or you have a kleptocracy/"banana republic" oligarchy. At present, that is the decision we face as a nation. If the banking Elites and their partners in the Central State (Fed and Treasury) are allowed to "win" and gut the property laws of the states, then the U.S.A. will be revealed as a kleptocracy/"banana republic" oligarchy.

If state laws are upheld, then the "too big to fail" banks are insolvent and they will fail. Then the question of kleptocracy arises once again: will the banks be allowed to fail as per Classic Capitalism, that is, their owners and managers will have to absorb the losses of that bankruptcy/failure, or will the Central State use its powers to collect taxes and cover the private losses of the Bank/Financial Power Elites? Privatizing profits and socializing losses has been the entire game plan since the global house of cards collapsed in 2008.

It's decision time, citizens. Either the banks/Central State "win" and we are a kleptocracy/ "banana republic," or they lose and the U.S. mortgage/ banking sector implodes and is either formally socialized (i.e. owned lock, stock and barrel by the Central State) or rebuilt from scratch without big banks, Federal guarantees and the Fed's incestuous interventions. ("We create the credit that enables the mortgage, you issue the mortgage, and then we buy the mortgage.")

There is no "fix" or half-measure that can patch this over now.

Sweet Lies

The industry that spends fortunes to convince you that terminator seeds and gene guns are just an extension of Mendel’s peas, and that neurotoxins like aspartame are healthy is at it again in the latest PR campaign to convince you that high fructose corn syrup is equivalent to sugar. 

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has petitioned the U.S. FDA to allow manufacturers the option of using the term “corn sugar” instead of “high fructose corn syrup”.

In their press release on the subject, they claim that “independent research demonstrates that the current labeling is confusing to American consumers.”

They blame “inexact scientific reports and inaccurate media accounts” for the current stigma associated with high fructose corn syrup.

In reality, as opposed to the CRA’s dream world, if you need to lose weight, or if you want to avoid diabetes and heart disease, high-fructose corn syrup is one type of sugar you’ll want to avoid.

Part of what makes HFCS such an unhealthy product is that it is metabolized to fat in your body far more rapidly than any other sugar (Read full article).

Calling out Keynesian Claptrap

Believing it important to also read the people you disagree with, not an article goes by where I don’t cringe at the opinions of Paul Krugman, as leading voice of the NYT Keynesian economic establishment.

In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result is that actions which we might find highly distasteful can have positive effects. Thus we cannot afford to be overly concerned with morality if the goal is to get out of the recession (Read Full Article)

Vaccines, GMOs and Population Control

More people are becoming aware of the dangers of mercury in vaccinations, but mercury is just the tip of a very long spear. Vaccines, such the annual flu shot, are a cocktail of other toxins such as formaldehyde, aluminum and oil-based adjuvants like squalene.  And the same industry which benefits by a widely held belief that flu vaccines are safe and effective through massive PR campaigns has never produced a real study that confirms either. The Cochrane group found that the maximum effective rate is 1-3% because for starters they seldom match the correct virus:

http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_vaccines_junk_science.html

So with all the downside risk, which is suppressed as with the attack on Dr. Wakefield’s autism studies, the potential benefit seems slim to none. But vaccines are profitable and protected by the FDA, which based on their track record (GMOs, glyphosate, aspartame, MSG and so on), clearly puts profitability and the agenda of its handlers before public health. Is it any wonder when powerhouse lobbyists are appointed as FDA advisors by the White House?

The corruption runs so deeply from the corporate, regulatory to the institutional because too few benefit from the truth:  

http://wholefoodusa.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/cdc-votes-everyone-should-get-flu-vaccination-this-fallwinter/

Darker still, the WHO, the world’s supposed health watchdog, worked for decades with population control councils to develop a stealth anti-fertility push in the 3^rd world through a tetanus vaccination program that only targeted women of child-bearing age.

http://www.naturalnews.com/026907_food_vaccination_health.html

Power, greed and control motives, expressed in NSSM 200, Henry Kissinger’s document on population reduction in resource rich countries using food as a weapon, are disguised by a fake veil of humanitarianism. 

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html

As a study in how the vaccine, GMO and population control agendas converge, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are currently financing a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) headed by former UN chief, Kofi Annan, which would push GMOs such as spermicidal corn, onto Africa.

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Swine_Flu/Gates_Vaccines/gates_vaccines.html