It is about time

Hello all

I know that I haven’t posted in a very long time and some of the one of you may not be reading this anymore, but I need to vent about our economy and these f’in bail outs.

First things first, about our wartime economy.

I completely understand that we need a strong military in order to protect ourselves. No problem. My point is that the actual waging of war is far more costly than anyone can even begin to imagine. An increase in the National Debt of 5 Trillion dollars in a matter of 5 years is incredible. 5 Trillion. That is $5,000,000,000,000.00 in 5 years. That equates to 2,739,726,027.40 a day. As an increase to the National Debt!!!! How does the government gain this money? From taking loans from the, not so federal, Federal Reserve and selling government bonds to foreign investors (including other countries governments such as China). China now holds the most US government bonds in the world. If China were to start to sell the bonds they have, our dollar will begin to devalue at a rate never before seen in US history. Go back to my post about the German economy crashing pre-Nazi and you will get a taste of what would come. In September or October of this year amidst the crazy ramblings of the Bank bail out BS, the congress quietly passed the Pentagons 2009 budget. It included a 40 Billion dollar increase. $40 Bill increase? What the hell is the total number of the budget if they were able to grab a $40 Bill increase without the media reporting it? If you remember the week before 9-11 happened, Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference in which he stated that, through an audit, they found that there was a portion of their budget that had been lost and therefore the money had not been accounted for in the amount of 1 trillion dollars. Too much money floating around without the people really knowing what is going on.

Now, lets look at what we have done with our money over the last thirty years. Rich brought up a good point. “If we do not spend on our military, that would leave the door open for someone else to pass us as world leaders of military strength.” (Paraphrase)

This is not true. Look at what we did during the cold war. We were easily bankrupting ourselves in order to maintain a military supremacy over a tactically inferior opponent. We could, if we wanted to, maintain the strongest, best-trained and able military in the world on a fraction of its current budget. We would have to look at a restructuring of the armed forces, but it is easily planned out. Also, the money we could save would easily cover the rebuilding of our crumbling infrastructure which in its current state, could not handle the increased demand of electricity if the auto makers were to perfect the electric car, nor is the rest of the public service infrastructure any better. Bottom line is…….Post WWII and Pre Iraq, we were the bad asses on the planet. No one wanted to F with us. (Korea and Vietnam were our fault. We went there instead of minding our own business.) Iraq happened so well the first time because no one knew what we had. Now everyone knows what our capabilities are and how to fight us. We are stretched thin and we cannot win a building-to-building battle. We will not fight that way. It is too uncivilized. What about war is civilized though. Anyway, we need to adopt a position, not of isolationism, but of non-interventionism. That means that we do not interfere with other people’s issues as long as they do not affect our people and/or our soil DIRECTLY!!!!

Anyway, about the bailouts. It is no surprise that I was against the bank bailouts and it should come as no surprise that I oppose the automaker bailouts. Once the government starts to get involved, everything gets worse. Look at what happened after the bank bill passed. The government said that it would stabilize the stock market. That day it dropped 5 hundred points? And it has dropped 5 thousand points since. The auto bill will be no different. All this is allowing to happen is it is giving the government leverage against the largest of the large businesses by either allowing them to buy up interest in the company or by issuing loans with the requirement of government oversight. That is a pretty way of saying “monetary black hole”. Once you bail out the auto industry, what about the computer industry? We cannot live without computers now. And the farming industry? The oil industry? The textile industry? Where does it end? It doesn’t. Not without us stopping it before it begins. That is why I am including this website with the contact information of all of the congressmen and women in DC and the local offices. Call them and voice you opposition to saving the rich while the middle class is failing.

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

or

http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

Just follow the instructions.

Good day to you all.

Dan

Off Topic

I got this email from Ron Paul today. It is a great depiction of our current financial situation. I urge everyone to read this and then re-read my post here about how the german economy tanked and the powers that be allowed it to happen to get rid of debt.

Enjoy.


Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,




Ron Paul

The Economy

"The foundation of Hitler's success in the first years rested not only on his triumphs in foreign affairs, which brought so many bloodless conquests, but on Germany's economic recovery, which in party circles and even among some economists abroad was hailed as a miracle."

"Unemployment, the curse of the Twenties and early Thirties, was reduced, as we have seen, from six million in 1932 to less that a million four years later."

"All of Schacht's admitted wizardry in finance was put to work to pay for getting the Third Reich ready for war. Printing banknotes was mearly one of his devices. He manipulated the currency with such legerdemain that at one time it was estimated by foreign economists to have 237 different values. He negotiated amazingly profitable(for Germany) barter deals with dozens of countries and to the astonishment of orthodox economists successfully demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it. His creation of credit in a country that had little liquid capital and almost no financial reserves was the work of genius, or--as some said--of a master manipulator. His invention of the so-called "Mefo" bills was a good example. These were simply bills created by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the state and used to pay armament manufacturers. The bills were accepted by all German banks and ultimately discounted by the Reichsbank. Since they appeared neither in the published statements of the national bank nor in the government's budget they helped maintain secrecy as to the extent of Germany's rearmament. From 1935 to 1938 they were used exclusively to finance rearmament and amounted to a total of twelve billion marks. In explaining them once to Hitler, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the harassed Minister of Finance, remarked that they were mearly a way of "printing money.""

"In September of 1936, with the inauguration of the Four-Year Plan under the iron control of Goering, who replaced Schacht as economic dictator though he was almost as ignorant of business as was Hitler, Germany went over to a total war economy. The purpose of the plan was to make Germany self-sufficient in four years, so that a wartime blockade would not stifle it. Imports were reduced to the bare minimum, severe price and wage controls were introduced, dividends restricted to 6 per cent, great factories set up to make synthetic rubber, textiles, fuel and other products from Germany's own sources of raw materials, and a giant Hermann Goering Works established to make steel out of the local low-grade ore."

"Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending "special contributions" to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler's regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned."

"Laws decreed in Oct. 1937 simply dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000."


The purpose for this post is to point out that Germany had a booming economy based on a wartime philosophy. The money made and the employment gained at this time made it very easy for the Nazi government to gain total economic control over the people. Those who had been struggling now had jobs and those who were running the big business received large amounts of profit from all of the new business. When people make money, they do not complain. Money cannot buy happiness? Well...true....but it sure can make the days and nights easier to deal with and a lot more comfortable.

We here in America do not realize that our economy is a war based system. The entire structure of our country is based on war time efforts and when not at war...getting ready for the next war. The nations largest companies realized this in the early years of the 20th century. Look at our war history since then:

WWI 1914-1918
WWII 1939-1945
Korea 1950-1953
Vietnam 1960-1975
Bay of Pigs 1961
Grenada 1983
Panama 1989
Perisan Gulf 1990-1991
Bosnia 1995-1996
Afghanistan 2001-Present
TERROR 2001-Present
Iraq 2003-Present

That is twelve military involvements in 94 years, consisting of 50 years of actual war. That leaves only 44 years of peace.
Anyone still believe that America does not run off of a wartime economy? The most lucrative time in American business was at the height of WWII. Look at the largest companies in America today.


1. Wal-Mart Stores
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Chevron
4. General Motors
5. ConocoPhillips
6. General Electric
7. Ford Motor
8. Citigroup
9. Bank of America
10. AT&T

Now do a little research into what companies are subsidiaries of these large corporations. You will find mostly all of the large military defence contractors listed here.

Just think of what we could achieve if half of the Iraqi war budget had gone to alternative fuel research? Or cancer research?

Anyone?

Dan

Next Last Post

Okay, so the last one wasn't the last one. Maybe this one will be. There is a lot of stuff that I wanted to write about, although I haven't really made examples of similar instances in today's world. I am hoping that you will make comments as to what you think the link is.

Pg 248

"To such a mindless man (Bernhard Rust)was now entrusted dictatorial control over German science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces."

""The whole education by a national state," he had written, "must aim primarily not are the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core." But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service "of a new national state"--a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' " he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already..What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' ""

Pg. 252

"The cost of such failure was great. After six years of Nazification the number of university students dropped by more that one half--from 127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater--from 20,474 to 9,554."

That is all I have on that. Next maybe will be on the Economy, Labor, and Justice.

Till then.

Dan

Last post

Today I am deciding to post my last post on this book. I haven't read it for a while and there are so many other things I am trying to do, not to mention the total lack of readers other than the two faithful.

Life in the Reich:

Pg. 231

"The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, taht so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation."

"The Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, was a warning of how ruthless the new leaders could be. Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm."

Pg. 232

"The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts of the revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreigners from flocking to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality. For Nazi Germany, much more than Soviet Russia, was open for all the world to see. The tourist business thrived and brought in vast sums of badly needed foreign currency."

Pg. 241

"On the evening of May 10, 1933, some four and a half months after Hitler became Chancellor, there occured in Belin a scene which had not been witnessed in the Western world since the late Middle Ages. At about midnight a torchlit parade of thousands of students ended at a square on Unter den Linden opposite the University of Berlin. Torches were put to a huge pile of books that had been gathered there, and as the flames enveloped them more books were thrown on the fire until some twenty thousand had been consumed. Similar scenes took place in several other cities. The book burning had begun."

Pg 244

"Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbles or by one of his aides what news to print and surpress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day."

Pg 247

"The radio and the motion pictures were also quickly harnessed to serve the propaganda of the Nazi State. Goebbles had always seen the radio (television had not yet come in) the chief instrument of propoganda in modern society and through the Radio Department of his ministry and the Chamber of Radio he gained complete control of broadcasting and shaped it to his own ends."

Pg. 248

"No one who had not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread concequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."

Maybe I will follow up with more later.

Dan

Post your thought on how this is like our current situation.

Death of the Republic

It has been a while I know, but here on page 226 President Hinddenburg has finnally passed. This is the key moment in which Hitler gains total power.

All through the summer the seemingly indestructable Hindenburg had been sinking and on August 2, at nine in the morning, he died in his eighty-seventh year. At noon, three hours later, it was announced that according to a law enacted by the cabinet on the preceding day the offices of Chancellor and President had been combined and that Adolf Hitler had taken over the powers of the head of state and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The title of President was abolished; Hitler would be known as Fuehrer and Reich Commander. His dictatorship had become complete. To leave no loopholes Hitler exacted from all officers and men of the armed forces an oath of allegiance--not to Germany, not to the constitution, which he had violated by not calling for the election of Hindenburg's successor, but to himself. It read:

I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for theis oath.

This is the end of democracy, or what was left of it in Germany. From here on, we will be talking of life in a Nazi Germany and how it resembles, however slight, life in the US now.

Hopefully, something like the death of democracy will not happen here in the US, but with the unpublicised documentation pertaining to the continuity of government in the event of a national emergency, one must wonder.

Thanks. Keep watching, I will post again pretty soon.

Dan

Reichstag Fire

On page 191, I started to read about the Reichstag fire and the power that Hitler was able to fenagal after it. I am now on page 200 so this is a tidbit of what I have read so far:

That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that “this is a Communist crime against the new government.” To the Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.”



At the same time a half witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus Van Der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble minded pyromaniac was a godsend for the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.



Van der Lubbe, it seems clear, was a dupe of the Nazis. He was encouraged to try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to be done- without his knowledge, of course-by the storm troopers. Indeed, it was established at the subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-wit did not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Two and a half minutes after he entered, the great central hall was fiercely burning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The main fires, according to the testimonies of experts at the trial, had been set with considerable quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man could not have carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible for him to start so many fires in so many scattered places in so short a time.

Van der Lubbe was found guilty and decapitated.



On the day following the fire, Feb. 28th, Hitler prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that:
“Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons.

To me, in my opinion, this sounds a lot like what happened on 9-11 and the following days in which the Patriot Act I was passed with intimidation tactics. It is very easy to see, if you believe that this is possable, that if GW Bush (A stout historian) has studied this topic, he could use the same tactics on the American people. The amount of power he has attained since 9-11 is unprecidented in American history and I am sure will not likely bee seen again. Well...Hopefully at least.

Lets hear what you think.

Dan