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America 2011

The American Dream
May 23, 2011

What kind of place is America in 2011?  Sadly, it is one giant sea of conformity.  If you traveled across the United States 40 or 50 years ago, you would encounter a vast array of cultures and you would meet a wonderful mix of people.  But today America is slowly but surely becoming standardized.  It seems like wherever you go you will find a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s.  Thanks to Hollywood and the mass media, people all over the country dress the same and look the same and talk the same.  Sure there are various subcultures out there, but even many of those subcultures are virtually the same on one coast as they are on the other.  The things that gave flavor to our local communities are dying off in favor of greater conformity and greater profit.  Today, most retail stores and most restaurants are corporate owned.  Most small businesses that attempt to go up against the Wal-Marts, the Targets, the Burger Kings or the Home Depots of the world have already been stomped out of existence or are in the process of being stomped out of existence.  Eventually, if we are not careful, corporate conformity is going to dominate everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Some may view this as “progress”, but is this really what the American Dream is supposed to be all about?  Is this really the “America” that we want to pass down to future generations?

Our society has become so homogenized that we don’t really question it anymore.  We all watch American Idol, we all buy the same boring looking cars we see advertised on television and we all buy the same mass-produced corporate products down at Costco.

For many Americans, doing something “exotic” means going out to Applebee’s on Friday night.

If you are under 40 years of age and you have never been out of the country you should really make it a point to do that. Today there are millions upon millions of young Americans that have no idea what “another culture” even looks like.  All they know is how America does things and they have been taught that the American way of doing things is always the best.

Sadly, sometimes we think our way is so superior that it should be forced upon the rest of the world.

When this nation was founded, our founding fathers were extremely suspicious of large concentrations of power.  Corporations did not dominate early America.  Instead, millions of individuals and small businesses worked together to make this country great.  Back in those days a “family store” could be started without fear that a corporate giant like Wal-Mart would come waltzing in to crush it.

When Wal-Marts started to spread across the United States, almost everyone loved them.  The prices were lower, the selection was much greater and Wal-Mart brought jobs to the community.

When I would visit family or friends they would always excitedly talk about the new Wal-Mart that was going up somewhere nearby.  They saw Wal-Mart as a sign of progress and something that would make their lives better.

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Unfortunately, we now know that all of that corporate conformity comes at a very high price.

When Wal-Mart moves into a community, often dozens of local businesses can’t compete and are forced to close.

Wal-Mart does bring jobs, but they are really crappy jobs.  A very, very small percentage of Wal-Mart jobs will even come close to enabling someone to support a family.

But Wal-Mart is making a ton of money.  So where does all of that money go?

It goes out of the local community and into the pockets of the Wal-Mart shareholders.

Wal-Mart is like a giant vacuum cleaner.  It sucks the wealth out of our local communities and it transfers it into the hands of the very wealthy.

But don’t all of the products sold at Wal-Mart support American businesses and American jobs?

No.

Just go into a Wal-Mart some time and start picking up products.  You will notice that the vast majority of them are made outside of the United States.

Americans love to buy stuff made in China.  And the big corporations love that because they are more than happy to pay slave labor wages to workers in places like China and India.

But I don’t want to just pick on Wal-Mart.  The vast majority of our retail establishments are now owned by huge corporations.  They all crush small businesses and they all suck wealth out of our local communities.

Most of us have enjoyed the “low, low prices” that the mega-corporations have brought in, but as inflation has gone up faster than our wages, large numbers of Americans have had to go into debt in order to enjoy all of these cheap products.

Today, what the average American family owes is equivalent to 136% of what an average American family makes each year.

We have a national addiction to debt.  To the corporations and the banks we are viewed as “consumers” and the goal is to drain as much money out of us as possible.  They want us to be completely dependent on them so that we will be snared in the trap of “consumerism” forever.

The fact that corporations have become so dominant in our society is a huge reason why wealth has become so concentrated at the top.  Today, the bottom 50 percent of all Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth.  In a true capitalist society this would not happen because individuals and small businesses would be able to compete fairly in the marketplace and would be thriving.

But unfortunately, our system greatly favors giant corporations today.  In fact, what we have in our country today is much more aptly called “corporatism” rather than “capitalism”.  The vast majority of Americans work for either a giant corporation or for the government.    We even teach our children that they should go to college and study hard so that they can “get a job” rather than telling them that they should endeavor to “start a business” someday.

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If nothing changes, wealth and power will continue to become even more concentrated in the hands of the few.  Meanwhile, America will just continue to become a giant sea of corporate conformity and a very boring place.

“America 2011″ is not nearly as interesting as America was 50 years ago.  We are becoming defined by our greedy corporate overlords.  We just blindly conform and we let others do our thinking for us.

If our founding fathers could see us today, they would be absolutely horrified.

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Horowitz and the Neocons Fear Patriot Ron Paul

Horowitz and the Neocons Fear Patriot Ron Paul

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 18, 2011

It is obvious Ron Paul represents a political threat to the neocons when the former Marxist David Horowitz calls the Texas congressman an anti-Semite.

“For years the Texas crackpot, Ron Paul, has been attacking America and Israel as imperialist powers — the Great Satan and the Little Satan, and calling for America’s retreat from the battle against our totalitarian enemies,” writes the former communist turned neocon (a natural transformation – the neocon movement was established by Trotskyites).

Horowitz continues:

At the recent CPAC conference Paul’s Jew-hating storm-troopers swarmed the Freedom Center’s table to vent their spleen against Israel as a Nazi state. Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States. Here is an alert from Gary Bauer about the amendment Ron Paul is proposing which may be voted on today.

Ron Paul and millions of other Americans believe the United States government does not have the right to confiscate the wealth of hard-working citizens and dole it out as “foreign aid” to Israel or any other nation.

Israel is the largest recipient of stolen goods from the American people and that is why it was mentioned by Ron Paul.

Obama approved a staggering $2.77 billion for Israeli foreign aid in 2010 and another $30 billion over the next decade. Since the establishment of Israel, the U.S. tax payer has forked over $103 billion.

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Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul – recently elected by the people of Kentucky to serve in the U.S. Senate – are not afraid of the neocons, Israel’s arm-twisting lobby in Washington, or the former Marxist turned neocon opportunist David Horowitz. It is immoral to take the money of the American people and give it away to Israel and Egypt – the second largest recipient of stolen goods – or any other country.

More than anything, the neocons know their shakedown scam is coming to an end. The United States has the largest national debt in history and can no longer afford to steal money and give it away to Israel of any other undeserving country. The bogus anti-Semitism canard no longer works.

It also irks Horowitz and the faux conservatives that Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll and actually stands a good chance of becoming the next president. For the neocons, a Ron Paul presidency is their worst nightmare. If elected, Paul will work hard to put an end to wars designed by neocons in the Pentagon to wreck small nations in the Middle East and kill Muslims and Arabs.

Ron and his son Rand Paul are not anti-Semites as the disingenuous David Horowitz claims. They are patriotic Americans who understand that the foreign and fiscal policies of the United States will ultimately destroy the nation and reduce its citizens to paupers.

David Horowitz and the neocons have done more than any other group in recent history – with the exception of the banksters – to facilitate the destruction of what was once the most productive republic in the world.

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Horowitz and the neocons are responsible for the murder of nearly a million and a half Iraqis. David Horowitz should be arrested immediately and tried as a war propagandist. He is no different than Hans Fritzsche, the German newspaper journalist who supported the Nazis. Fritzsche was charged with conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Deception at the Fed

Deception at the Fed

 

Ron Paul
Infowars.com
February 18, 2011

For the past three decades, the Federal Reserve has been given a dual mandate: keeping prices stable and maximizing employment. This policy relies not only on the fatal conceit of believing in the wisdom of supposed experts, but also on numerical chicanery.

Rather than understanding inflation in the classical sense as a monetary phenomenon– an increase in the money supply- it has been redefined as an increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI is calculated based on a weighted basket of goods which is constantly fluctuating, allowing for manipulation of the index to keep inflation expectations low. Employment figures are much the same, relying on survey data, seasonal adjustments, and birth/death models, while the major focus remains on the unemployment rate. Of course, the unemployment rate can fall as discouraged workers drop out of the labor market altogether, leading to the phenomenon of a falling unemployment rate with no job growth.

In terms of keeping stable prices, the Fed has failed miserably. According to the government’s own CPI calculators, it takes $2.65 today to purchase what cost one dollar in 1980. And since its creation in 1913, the Federal Reserve has presided over a 98% decline in the dollar’s purchasing power. The average American family sees the price of milk, eggs, and meat increasing, while packaged household goods decrease in size rather than price.

Loose fiscal policy has failed to create jobs also. Consider that we had a $700 billion TARP program, nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending, a government takeover of General Motors, and hundreds of billions of dollars of guarantees to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, FDIC, etc. On top of those programs the Federal Reserve has provided over $4 trillion worth of assistance over the past few years through its credit facilities, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and now its second round of quantitative easing. Yet even after all these trillions of dollars of spending and bailouts, total nonfarm payroll employment is still seven million jobs lower than it was before this crisis began.

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In this same period of time, the total U.S. population has increased by nine million people. We would expect that roughly four million of these people should have been employed, so we are really dealing with eleven million fewer employed people than would otherwise be expected.

It should not be surprising that monetary policy is ineffective at creating actual jobs. It is the effects of monetary policy itself that cause the boom and bust of the business cycle that leads to swings in the unemployment rate. By lowering interest rates through its loose monetary policy, the Fed spurs investment in long-term projects that would not be profitable at market-determined interest rates. Everything seems to go well for awhile until businesses realize that they cannot sell their newly-built houses, their inventories of iron ore, or their new cars. Until these resources are redirected, often with great economic pain for all involved, true economic recovery cannot begin.

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Over $4 trillion in bailout facilities and outright debt monetization, combined with interest rates near zero for over two years, have not and will not contribute to increased employment. What is needed is liquidation of debt and malinvested resources. Pumping money into the same sectors that have just crashed merely prolongs the crisis. Until we learn the lesson that jobs are produced through real savings and investment and not through the creation of new money, we are doomed to repeat this boom and bust cycle.

Read more at Rep. Ron Paul’s House web page.

Ron Paul Monetary Hearing: You Are Invited

Ron Paul Monetary Hearing: You Are Invited

 

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
LRC
February 7, 2011

The historic first hearing of Chairman Ron Paul’s monetary policy committee, to expose the Fed as the prime creator of unemployment and so much human suffering, will take place at: 10:00AM on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, in Room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the main hearing room of the Financial Services Committee. The witnesses include the eloquent Austro-free-market stars Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College and Richard Vedder of Ohio University.

The Fed itself, and at least three big banks, lobbied against Ron’s chairmanship. Republicans who share their fear of the truth worked with Paul Ryan, chairman of the “Budget” Committee, to schedule hearings with Bernanke at the exact same time as Ron’s, to try to diminish the significance of Ron’s. Ryan, btw, is the fair-haired boy of the Republican leadership who gave the boring response to Obama’s boring State of the Empire Address. Like the Republican leadership, Ryan talks about cutting spending, but that is only a ruse. Ryan is a big-government neocon, and so naturally supported TARP, Bush’s prescription drug welfare, his wars, and the empire.

I don’t believe this insider trick will work against Ron, because his support comes not from the regime or the Republican leadership, but from the grassroots. I think the Paulians will pack Ron’s hearings, and not only to show their support for him against the power elite. These hearings will have huge significance in the fight against the Fed, the fractional-reserve banksters, and other destroyers of our prosperity and freedom. It will also be a lot of fun!

Another Economic "Martial Law in the Streets" Moment Approaches

Another Economic ‘Martial Law in the Streets’ Moment Approaches

 

Eric Blair
Infowars.com
Feb 5, 2011

In the fall of 2008, during the lead up to the TARP bailout of the financial industry, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warned members of Congress that there will be Martial Law in America should they fail to pass the multi-trillion dollar looting of the taxpayer.

Well, despite the American public being overwhelmingly against the bailout, the blackmail worked and the banks got their money. If it worked once, why not try it again?

With the economy no better off for having borrowed trillions to “stabilize” criminal financial institutions, the national debt ceiling is rapidly approaching.  As some Republicans begin to float the notion of blocking this extension of credit, the Treasury Department, Democrats in Congress, and Ben Bernanke issued apocalyptic warnings clearly showing how pathetically fragile the U.S. economy is.

These threats, reminiscent of Paulson’s 2008 ransom demands, once again appear to be offering two black-and-white choices: Armageddon or more debt.  The coordinated pitch for higher debt levels is echoing the same urgency as the TARP looting, as Treasury Secretary Geithner said the government is insolvent and will run out of money in about two months’ time unless Congress votes to raise the federal debt ceiling.

The AFP reported Thursday that Senate Democrats warned that the government would “shut down” if the debt ceiling was not raised.  Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained what that would mean if a shutdown were to occur: “citizens couldn’t get their checks, veterans couldn’t get their benefits, military payments would stop.”

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Ben Bernanke doubled down on the debt-fear campaign in a rare press conference where he said, “Beyond a certain point . . . the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt. And the implications of that on our financial system, our fiscal policy and our economy would be catastrophic.”

Fiscal conservatives who oppose raising the debt ceiling say it is just delaying necessary belt-tightening and massive spending cuts, and say that raising the debt ceiling further only forestalls needed austerity moves to avoid a more catastrophic collapse in the future. House Republicans presented a plan to cut $32 billion from the budget, which is laughable given the impossible-to-pay-off debt levels.

The U.S. national debt is approaching the ceiling of $14.29 trillion; unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare are estimated to be around $100 trillion; and the total cost of stabilizing the financial industry is reportedly upwards of $23.7 trillion.  And these numbers say nothing of the fraudulent $600-trillion derivatives scam. No amount of tax increases, spending cuts, or economic growth will be sufficient to satisfy this equation.

The notion that America can somehow pull itself out of this mess if average citizens, who had no part in creating the national debt, would only “tighten their belts,” seems preposterous.

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None of the options are exactly attractive to the already over-burdened taxpayer. Indeed, the people are being given a lose-lose-lose scenario: 1) the status quo of slow economic demolition through raising the debt ceiling; 2) crippling austerity cuts and public asset looting; or, 3) catastrophic collapse.

Although the banks and their pocket-change politicians describe market conditions that would result in a collapse should the ceiling not be raised, it seems obvious that the only power capable of drastically changing economic conditions are the banks themselves.  Therefore, market conditions appear to be an increasingly insignificant part of a bigger illusion.

As if the sun would not rise if a piece of legislation was not passed, the gun-to-the-head urgency will likely result in raising the debt ceiling.  If the level of resistance comes close to the near unanimous public disgust over the TARP bill, you can bet we’ll hear new warnings of “martial law in the streets” in order to keep the illusion in tact.  If for some reason collapse is unavoidable, the U.S. military is actively war gaming “large scale economic breakdown” and “civil unrest” should they choose otherwise.

Eric Blair writes for Activist Post.com