Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Debt Ceiling "crisis" & the "Fed"

"Andrew Jackson and Banking Crisis of 1833"
"..something known as the debt ceiling - a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before." -- President Obama, Primetime Debt Speech read on Monday, July 25, 2011

"If it's Kansas, Missouri, no big deal.  You know, that's the dance of the low-sloping foreheads.  The middle places, right?  …Did I just say that aloud?" -- David Carr, NY Time's media, replying to TV pundit Bill Maher, June 2011
The Foundation: Editor's Note -- article source: http://patriotpost.us/edition/2011/08/01/brief/
"Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be."  -- John Adams






Boehner, Obama and Reid
     The debt-ceiling "deal" agreed to by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and President Barack Obama over the weekend is Washington politics at its finest: Cut $2 trillion from federal spending over a decade in return for adding $2.4 trillion to the current $14.3 trillion debt this year.  That's enough that the debt ceiling debate won't have to occur again until after the 2012 elections, throwing Obama a life preserver. What a deal! (Yeah, we know.  You could cut the sarcasm with a knife.)
     We're not the only ones who aren't happy, either.  The New York Times editorialized against the "hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists," and Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO) called it a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich."  If they feel that way about cuts in growth rates over 10 years, just imagine what they would say if spending were actually cut.  Fortunately, the deal includes no tax hikes, and that's a Tea Party victory that will help the economy.
     All things considered, this deal is just about as good as we could hope for without controlling the Senate or the White House, and it's a launching pad for gaining just that in next year's election.   What do you think?


Essential Liberty -- Government by the elected representatives of the people is coming to be government by two (or three or four) men in a secret room pronouncing the new law that will be rubber-stamped -- or else!   Accepting such a process as normal is a new phenomenon, but it is becoming in Washington an acceptable procedure.  ...  Even the smartest, best-informed presidents and speakers ... cannot possibly know the fuller implications of all the agreements they are making.   ...   The top leaders are incapable of drafting a big technical bill.   The details will get written by staffers and regulators after the bill is enacted into law.   That is why now, for example, a year after the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law was passed, more than 200 regulations -- all the teeth of the bill -- have yet to be even drafted by regulators.   That is why when regular order is followed and laws are enacted as they have been for 200 years -- both in Congress and the executive branch -- hundreds of highly specialized staffers have to be called upon to explain what broad-brush numbers will mean in real life.  ...  Each time we have one of these secret deal negotiations -- instead of regular order -- the magnitude of the proposed change in our way of life gets bigger, and the process gets more exclusive and sloppier.   This is not only bad legislating but also dangerous to our constitutional process."  --columnist Tony Blankley

Opinion in Brief -- [N]obody loves Obama.   This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard.  ...  The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people.  ...  The fact is, he's good at dismantling.   He's good at critiquing.   He's good at not being the last guy, the one you didn't like.   But he's not good at building, creating, calling into being.   He was good at summoning hope, but he's not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.   And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight.   He wasn't serious, he was only shrewd -- and shrewdness wasn't enough.  ...  So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces -- the presidency, the U.S. Senate.   In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique.   He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist.   He is a loser.   And this is America, where nobody loves a loser." --columnist Peggy Noonan

"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."  -- Calvin Coolidge (see video below)

"The national budget must be balanced.  The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled.  Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt.   People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.

Warning:
"Let me control a peoples currency and I care not who makes their laws." -- Meyer Nathaniel Rothschild in a speech to a gathering of world bankers February 12, 1912

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies,   Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set governments at defiance.  The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."  -- Thomas Jefferson (b.1743-d.1826), 3rd President of the United States: 1801-1809

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." -- James Abram Garfield (b.1831-d.1881 20th President of the United States: 1881-1881
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." -- Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company, commenting on the privately owned "Federal Reserve System"

"We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.  I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED.  They are not government institutions.  They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..." -- Lewis McFaddon, U.S. Congressman


Warning:
"The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind.  It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism and Socialism.  All of these are directed to making the United States a member of a World Government..." -- American Mercury Magazine, December 57, pg. 92.

"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits,  or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class.   The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages will bear its burden without complaint.." -- Rothshild Brothers of London, in a letter discussing their new banking scheme with fellow bankers, dated June 25, 1863

(o'bamaworld)
"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States." -- George W. Malone, U.S. Senator, speaking before Congress in 1957


Warning: (o'bamanomics, o'bamastapo, o'redistribute, o'bamaworld)
"In the World Bank's 1994 Human Development Report, an essay by Nobel Prize-winning economist Jan Tinbergen, entitled "Global Governance for the 21 Century," states: "Mankind's problems can no longer be solved by national governments.  What is needed is a World Government."  This government he says, should be empowered with a "World Police" and a program for "the redistribution of world income."

Warning: (o'bamatactics, o'classwarfare)
"The Bankers Manifesto" -- "Capital must protect itself in every way.... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible.   When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers.  People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders.  This is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world.  By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd." -- From the Civil Servant's Year Book, "The Organizer", January 1934
 Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933), 30th US President,  "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."