Just a Reminder
Posted on September 17, 2008
Filed Under Dramanomics |
In a week that has seen the failure of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, an $85 billion US government bailout of AIG and the greatest one-day , I thought it’d be worthwhile to remind loyal readers of The Drama 2.0 Show that while kool aid drinkers were , yours truly knew what was up.
Here’s a montage of past Drama 2.0 Show posts and comments celebrating a week of wealth transfer from pigs to hogs.
Stanley: you do realize that technically the United States government is bankrupt, right? It’s paying its bills with money it borrows.
The Fed (which is a private organization) has been printing money to ease the credit crunch and other central banks have been intervening in the global markets, but if you’ve been following, this central bank intervention hasn’t had anywhere near the impact that previous interventions have had. In short, the global monetary system and the financial instruments that have been created to exploit it have become so complex and out of control that the idea central banks have much control anymore is naive at best.
Regardless of what you think causes consumerism, it isn’t simply fueled by easy access to debt; it’s fueled by a global monetary system that’s essentially a ponzi scheme. Thinking that a government which essentially ceded control of the printing of money to private bankers is going to save the day is extremely naive. It’s akin to trusting a thief to guard your house. The majority of your elected officials have no basic knowledge of economics and monetary policy. At this point, most Americans are little more than sheep being led to an economic slaughter.
If you want to make a realistic prediction, here’s one: the value of today’s fiat currencies, like the US dollar, will eventually return to their natural value - nothing. Every previous fiat currency has.
History is replete with examples of people thinking that something bad just can’t happen because “this time” it’s different. And it never is.
The situation is actually quite simple:
1. Fiat money is worthless.
2. Fractional reserve banking is nothing more than a ponzi scheme.There is no question that there will be continued attempted “treatments” of the flawed monetary system but so long as these “treatments” target the symptoms instead of the underlying flaws, the real problems will only get worse. Eventually the problems will become so bad that “treatments” become ineffective.
Additionally, please recognize that the US government does not manipulate the money supply - the Federal Reserve does. The Fed is a private bank and if you trust that the Fed is representing the interests of the United States instead of the interests of the elite bankers who own the Fed banks, you’re being extremely naive. As Mayer Amschel Rothschild said, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.”
When looking at what’s currently going on with the money supply, you might want to ponder the possible reasons the Fed stopped releasing the M3 figures last year.
“The world is in this together and nobody wants it to fall apart.”
Most of the world is in this together. Unfortunately, you either forget or are not aware that there do exist small groups that exploit their power to make money. These “kingmakers” make more money building up nations (and economies) and destroying them than they do simply building them up. While stability is the desire of the average man, instability is the desire of the opportunistic man.
I leave you with a few relevant quotes from men far more wise than I:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
“The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction… I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity… is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Thomas Jefferson
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men….”
Woodrow Wilson (1913)
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements….The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States….The United States under present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against it.”
Rep. Louis McFadden (1930)
“[The] abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit…. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holdings illegal, as was done in the case of gold…. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves…. [This] is the shabby secret of the welfare statist’s tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.”
Alan Greenspan (1966)
…those who trust the government to safeguard their wealth are liable to find that not only have they lost it, but that it never really existed in the first place. C’est la vie.
The United States’ consumer culture has required loose fiscal policy and exotic financial instruments to support it. These have created a precarious situation of unknown but certainly nightmarish proportions. To be sure, the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market is just the tip of a humongous iceberg.
In the one minute it takes you to view the photo gallery of a guy on MySpace flexing his muscles in front of his new souped-up Cadillac Escalade (leased, of course) or to watch a girl on YouTube “shaking what her mama gave her” to a Shakira tune, our national debt increased by over $1 million. Much of the money used to finance this debt comes from foreign investors. Web 2.0 may not have created the narcissism beast that I think is contributing to the economic decline of the United States, but it’s certainly feeding it one MySpace profile at a time, one YouTube video at a time.
By the time you finish watching this video, the United States will have added over $2 million to the national debt. That’s money that we, and our children, will pay back one way or the other at some point in the future, most likely sooner than later.
The central bank’s increasingly futile attempts to save the US economy are becoming more apparent. Although stocks jumped Thursday on the back of Ben Bernanke’s comments about “substantive additional action” and Bank of America’s buyout of tattered mortgage lender Countrywide (which you’ll be helping them finance), they were down again sharply on Friday on the back of more write-downs (including a possible $15 billion Merrill Lynch loss), signs of slowed consumer spending, a trade deficit that soared in November and increasing predictions that a recession is going to occur.
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Drama 2.0 spikes the Web 2.0 kool aid by providing critical analyses of Web 2.0, its people, its startups and its impact on the world of media. Other topics are explored when Drama 2.0 has been drinking too much 1975 Dom Perignon. Read more about the Internet's version of Keyser Söze here.
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