Saturday, July 24, 2010

Stalin's Jews

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened


to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

2011: The Year Of The Tax Increase

Unless the U.S. Congress acts, there is going to be a massive wave of tax increases in 2011. In fact, some are already calling 2011 the year of the tax increase. A whole host of tax cuts that Congress established between 2001 and 2003 are set to expire in January unless Congress chooses to renew them. But with Democrats firmly in control of both houses that appears to be extremely unlikely. These tax increases are going to affect every single American (at least those who actually pay taxes). But this will be just the first wave of tax increases. Another huge slate of tax increases passed in the health care reform law is scheduled to go into effect by 2019. So Americans that are already infuriated by our tax system are only going to become more frustrated in the years ahead. The reality is that the U.S. government will soon be digging much deeper into our wallets.

The following are some of the tax increases that are scheduled to go into effect in 2011....

1 - The lowest bracket for the personal income tax is going to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent.

2 - The next lowest bracket for the personal income tax is going to increase from 25 percent to 28 percent.

3 - The 28 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 31 percent.

4 - The 33 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 36 percent.

5 - The 35 percent tax bracket is going to increase to 39.6 percent.

6 - In 2011, the death tax is scheduled to return. So instead of paying zero percent, estates of $1 million or more are going to be taxed at a rate of 55 percent.

7 - The capital gains tax is going to increase from 15 percent to 20 percent.

8 - The tax on dividends is going to increase from 15 percent to 39.6 percent.

9 - The "marriage penalty" is also scheduled to be reinstated in 2011.

It is being estimated that the total cost of these tax increases to U.S. taxpayers will be $2.6 trillion through the year 2020.

Ouch!

But wait, there are even more tax increases coming.

The "health care reform law" contains over a dozen new taxes that will be implemented in stages over the next decade. When you add all of these taxes to the taxes that were mentioned earlier, the result is going to be absolutely devastating. According to an analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation the health care reform law will generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes by the year 2019.

Double ouch!

So is it any wonder why the public has such a low opinion of the U.S. Congress?

Every single major poll done on the topic shows that approval ratings for Congress are at record lows.

For example, Gallup's 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll found Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year.

Of course there are a whole host of reasons why the American people are upset with Congress, but one of the big ones is the fact that we are literally being taxed to death.

However, it is not just federal income taxes that are killing us.

In a previous article entitled "Taxed Enough Already!", we listed just a few of the taxes that Americans have to pay each year....

Accounts Receivable Tax

Building Permit Tax

Capital Gains Tax

CDL license Tax

Cigarette Tax

Corporate Income Tax

Court Fines (indirect taxes)

Dog License Tax

Federal Income Tax

Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)

Fishing License Tax

Food License Tax

Fuel permit tax

Gasoline Tax

Gift Tax

Hunting License Tax

Inheritance Tax

Inventory tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)

IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)

Liquor Tax

Local Income Tax

Luxury Taxes

Marriage License Tax

Medicare Tax

Payroll Taxes

Property Tax

Real Estate Tax

Recreational Vehicle Tax

Road Toll Booth Taxes

Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)

Sales Taxes

School Tax

Septic Permit Tax

Service Charge Taxes

Social Security Tax

State Income Tax

State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)

Telephone federal excise tax

Telephone federal universal service fee tax

Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes

Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax

Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax

Telephone state and local tax

Telephone usage charge tax

Toll Bridge Taxes

Toll Tunnel Taxes

Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)

Trailer registration tax

Utility Taxes

Vehicle License Registration Tax

Vehicle Sales Tax

Watercraft registration Tax

Well Permit Tax

Workers Compensation Tax

Are you dizzy yet?

The reality is that the American people are being drained in dozens and dozens of different ways.

But what did you expect?

Did you think that our politicians would pile up the biggest debt in the history of the world and never ask you to pay for it?

Did you think that we could run deficits equivalent to about 10 percent of GDP without ever seeing tax increases?

The truth is that the U.S. government needs a whole lot more money than even these new tax increases will bring in.

After all, it is being projected that the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion on the interest on the national debt alone by the year 2020.

To put that in perspective, the entire budget for the U.S. government is less than $4 trillion for 2010.

Are you starting to get the picture?

In the years ahead the IRS is going to be digging deeper and deeper into our pockets and a gigantic chunk of that money is going to go directly into the pockets of those who own our debt.

But very few Americans wanted to listen when this problem was actually somewhat fixable 20 or 30 years ago.

So now we are all going to pay the price - literally.

BP digitally alters press photo, confesses it's a fake

It's been a long season of embarrassment for BP, but leaking oil isn't what the blogosphere is ripping the company for today. A site called Americablog spotted a press photo of BP's Houston command center, ostensibly taken on July 16. The image had quite visibly been Photoshopped — badly — to include more on-screen camera action.

Once word got out — the story was picked up by the Washington Post, where it was then spotted by the tech blog Gizmodo and others — BP 'fessed up. A spokesman admitted that the image was altered, said that a photographer had inserted shots where the TV screens were blank, and provided the original image.

"We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future," said the spokesman in an e-mail to the Washington Post.

Though the command center alteration doesn't seem to be an attempt to hide facts or confuse the public, it heightens skepticism for the company at a time when it should be trying to build trust. As the Americablog reporter John Aravosis wrote, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center."

As it happens, the command center shot isn't the end of the issue. Today, Aravosis published evidence of another altered press photo, this one depicting a meeting from the failed "top kill" maneuver. "How many other crisis response photos from BP have been faked?" wrote Aravosis. "Did they fake any videos?"

Please don't tell us that the people in those sucking-it-up-and-taking-responsibilty ads are actually paid models!

Catch up with Wilson on Twitter at @wjrothman. Fourth-grade Photoshop skills required.

© 2010 msnbc.com Reprints

Airport Peepshow

What you are about to read is true…

The names have been changed to be more appropriate...

This is a tale about an individual’s struggle against the fear-mongering forces of the collectivist state.

It is a short tale, but it carries a message that will resonate with millions.

The Cast of Characters:

Gatekeeper – Height: unknown from a sitting position. Adept with a hologram illuminating flashlight, and quick to mark up a boarding pass with any weird squiggly or zig-zag that might make the amateur terrorist nervous.

Gestapo Member #1 – A tall, older man with thinning grey hair, a shiny badge, and a sense of no nonsense urgency about him.

Gestapo Member #2 – Rotund. 35–40 years old. Goatee and proud owner of multiple chins. Very possible that GM #2 read Mark Sisson’s lesser-known book, The Primal Demeanor.

Gestapo Female – Mid 40’s. Quick with the x-ray bag scanner, and even quicker to rummage through the bag of anyone who raises a red flag.

Me – An open-minded, free-thinking, individual. Who, with the help of other freedom lovers, has become a well-established seer of all things "bogus" with anything our central government tries to force the masses to do.

Our story begins on a balmy Midwestern morning in Columbus, OH. I had planned a short getaway to New York City for an overdue visit with a very good friend. I arrived at the airport early because I had known about the addition of the X-Ray "backscatter" machines just a month before. I knew anything was possible, especially since I was going to refuse to be the subject of a peep show should I be asked.

Few people are aware that Columbus is well known in some circles for being one of the top test markets in the country for the fast food industry. Columbus has a diverse demographic; the people here come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. If someone in a fast food test kitchen develops a snappy new dish, off to Columbus it goes! (fingers and clogged arteries crossed)

So it didn’t surprise me that the TSA would choose Columbus as a "test market" for their nudi-booth scanners, since many of the TSA employees most likely got their start making barely edible food, fast.

(Writer’s note: Based upon multiple years with a large fast food corporation, I possess a self-issued license to mock those in the industry, as well as the industry itself.)

As I neared the labyrinth of ropes that one must navigate before the inquisition begins, I briefly thought of the line that forms before any good roller coaster. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have the option of purchasing a funnel cake once the ride was over. Many people were being herded into the line like cattle in a stockyard. I took a deep breath, channeled my inner bovine, and fell in like a good boy.

At the end of the labyrinth, sitting atop his state-issued stool, resting his upper body on his state-issued podium, loomed the Gatekeeper. As I approached him, pangs of frustration and annoyance began to well up from deep within my being. The years of reading the words of freedom icons such as Rockwell, Paul, Shaffer and Suprynowicz (among many, many others), had made me allergic to anything that the state has tried to do. I have often attempted to speak to anyone who would listen about the concept of free will, individualism, and love for the fellow man. Four years ago, it felt as if everyone was aurally challenged, but after the economic collapse, the very one that Ron Paul and others of the "Austrian" mind forecasted, I started to sense the tides turning a bit in the favor of freedom. There are more people questioning the necessity of the census, more people wondering where money actually comes from, more people questioning the propagandistic saber rattling found on all cable news channels. Simply put, more people asking good questions!

I reached the front of the line and the Gatekeeper took a long look at my ID and boarding pass. My first name, Ladislaus, always trips them up. It is not a normal name, like "Steve" or "Bob." I believe I am often asked a banal question just to hear if I have an accent. This time was no different.

"Off to New York, Huh?"

"Yes, sir."

(Long, intense look into my eyes)

"Enjoy your trip."

Then, three squiggles on the boarding pass, and I was given passage to the next layer of the Inferno.

I had mentally prepared for what I was to see next. Mr. Rockwell had posted a blog a few days prior about this very same set up. To the left of me was the standard metal detector, and on the right, the infamous "backscatter radiation" machine. To my slight surprise, there were many people who seemed very interested in testing the new security device. I mentioned earlier that the freedom movement was catching on, but we still have a lot of work to do! There is always a bit of a sting that accompanies the "real-world" realization that not everyone reads the LRC Blog.

I walked a direct line to the metal detector side and began the obtrusive process of becoming "metal detector friendly." I watched as my shoes, belt, cell phone, loose change, ring, laptop, laptop battery, keys, and carry-on bags worked their way down the conveyor belt while I awaited passage through the metal detector.

At this point, Gestapo Member #1 called out to me.

"Sir, this line over here is open; you are welcome to walk through this one."

I adamantly responded, "No thank you. I do not wish to travel through that line."

He replied more intensely, "You are declining the search?"

"Yes, sir, I am."

At this point he spoke into his shoulder mounted radio and said, "Male full body search!"

He then turned to me and said rather sternly, like a father who wasn't messing around, "Wait here."

So I waited, for about three minutes. In the mean time, they had found "something" in the x-ray process of my carry-on. Gestapo Lady shouted, "Whose bag is this? Whose bag is this?!"

I leaned over the divider and told her it was mine, and that I was awaiting a pat-down.

Gestapo Member #2 then approached. He wore blue surgical gloves and a smirk on his face. Something about him told me he was not the president of the chess club during his youth.

He said to me, "You know this would go a lot quicker if you would only stand in the backscatter machine and be done with it."

"I will not do that, sir. I still possess my dignity. No one will be seeing anything through my clothes."

"Well, now I have to touch you all over your body, will you still have dignity then?"

"Do what you have to, but I will never walk through that machine."

The pat-down station was out in the open and facing a restaurant. I was told to stretch out my arms and stand still. People looked up from their breakfast to observe the action. I couldn’t help but think that those who resisted were subject to an attempted public demoralization. Of course, I had yet to retrieve my belt; so my shorts nearly fell off when he pulled on them. At least 20 people now know what sort of underwear I prefer.

"Now I am going to pat down your crotch." At this moment, something inside of me snapped. I have read hundreds of tales of woe from fellow freedom lovers over the years, tales of run-ins with the tax feeding pestilence of the state. I have felt for these people, but I have never truly understood the feeling until this very moment. As his meat hooks groped for phantom weaponry, my face flushed, and I seethed. I then reminded myself to remain calm and stoic. I saw no reason to get detained or even worse, tased.

I took a deep breath and remembered that humor is really the only medicine for me in awkward situations like these. I nearly commented about his touch being similar to my prom date. I thought against it though, having faith that this nightmare would be over soon.

After he realized I wasn't hiding any weapons of death, or so much as a sharpened pencil, I was made to sit down and await the full search of my carry-on bag.

They swabbed it for explosive material…

They then scanned it again…

What was the BIG FIND?

I had neglected to remove a 3 oz. container of face lotion. Yes, a desire for a moisturized face does not happy a Gestapo member make.

Gestapo Lady tersely said to me, "Sir, are you aware that there is a bottle of lotion in your bag?"

"No, I am sorry; I forgot it was in there, but interesting that you knew it was a bottle of lotion and not something else."

She said nothing to that comment, but then spritely told me, "I am going to scan your bag again so you can quickly be on your way."

The 3rd x-ray of my bag yielded no red flags.

"Here you are. Have a great flight."

I had no response.

As I turned and walked away, shoes untied, shorts askew, personal belongings awkwardly held in a disheveled clump in my arms, a wide smile came across my face. I found solace in the knowledge that this sort of behavior will not last forever. Sure, there are a lot of people who wish to remain "plugged in" to the system. The system that perpetuates sloth, fear, and ignorance. The system whose days are numbered. Freedom and individualism will win out because there is no better feeling than self-empowerment. I thought about the constant increase in traffic to websites like LewRockwell.com, as well as a documented intensified interest in the writings of Jefferson, Mises and Rothbard. I look forward, with fondness, to the societal "correction" that is brewing across this country, and many others. I feel renewed strength to be patient with the masses of people who continue to live their lives in an angst-laden haze. It is just not their time to awaken yet, but soon it will be, and I will be there, eagerly waiting to help them understand for themselves that the real truth lies within themselves, and not in the hands of a tyrannical central government.

The ideas of freedom will triumph.

The US Government is Dying

Originally written as a response to a reader letter, the article is reposted due to numerous requests.

The US Government is dying. Its ultimate fate was sealed the moment the Federal Reserve Fiat money system was put into place. Like a recreational drug user enjoying that first chemical rush, those who created the federal Reserve luxuriated in the seemingly endless flow of money pouring forth from the Federal Reserve, money used to prolong and consolidate power, money spent without worry in the full knowledge that it was going to be someone else's problem to pay it all back.

But now the US Government is paying the price for that glorious free-spending time of so long ago. Like a recreational drug user now turned hopeless addict, the government has taxed profitable businesses into seeking friendlier homes in other lands, and has turned to looting trust funds and playing bookkeeping games trying to hold off the final collapse...

The U.S. Government is Dying: No longer able to conceal the financial losses, the US Government, like a desperate addict, is turning to crime as a source of funds, crime on a global scale, conquest, war for profit, call it what you will, an invasion and looting of a nation is different from an invasion and looting of a home only in scale.

The US Government has been making bad decisions since at least the 80s. In hindsight, a government composed almost entirely of lawyers should not have been expected to know anything about how to run an economy based on manufacturing. As a result, legislation was passed that encouraged manufacturing to leave this nation. The lawyer/politicians, rather than admit error, tried to conceal this loss by inventing the "service economy", a ridiculous notion that one can prosper a nation by doing each others' laundry for a fee. The service economy did not bring money into the nation, it merely moved what was left around faster, increasing opportunities for taxation. The effect of this was that cash flowed from the people to the government, good for government struggling with a crushing debt load, but bad for the people for the nation, 80% of whom suffered and continue to suffer a steady decline of living standards throughout the 80s, 90s, and into the 21st Century.

Minus the manufacture of actual products, investors flocked to more speculative ventures, many of which turned out to be gigantic stock manipulation swindles.

But rather than address the problems, the government started playing its own bookkeeping games, looting Social Security and claiming it was a budget surplus. Knowing that the stock market was in trouble, the "Plunge Protection Team" was created to use government sanctioned rigging to keep the numbers high, as a political banner, even though such activity made the underlying problem of over-valuation much, much worse.

The loss of manufacturing to other nations meant that Americans had to buy more and more products once made in the USA from companies in other nations. This created the present $1.5 billion a DAY trade deficit. Normally, such a trade imbalance would drive the value of the dollar down, but a devalued dollar makes that portion of the government debt held by foreign interests increase, since the debt is held in the currency of the lending institution.

This was the rock and hard place the US Government found itself in. So deep in debt it cannot even make the interest payments, unable to sell products to generate revenues to pay that debt because manufacturing was taxed into relocating, and a threatened collapse of the dollar that would force a default on the debt and ruin the standard of living Americans had worked so hard to achieve.

From that perspective, a war of conquest to grab oil and to force the conquered nations to use the dollar to keep demand for the dollar high looks like the best option for a bankrupted government.

But is it best for the people?

Let us say for a moment that we do go to war. Let us say we conquer several nations and force them to use the dollar. How does that change life here in the United States? We would still have a totalitarian government deeply in debt. To maintain its legitimacy, that government would still have to shackle you and your children to that debt. We still would not have a tax system conducive to creation of new manufacturing in this country. In other words, even winning the war would not improve our lives. All that would be accomplished after all the blood was shed and the money was spent was that the very same people who got us all into this mess would continue in power.

Let's try the other option. Let's say that the US Government, unable to initiate a war, or starting one but unable to carry it out, watches as the world switches to the Euro, and the over-valued and frankly worthless debt-stricken dollar collapses. The Federal Reserve collapses. The people will not tolerate another "bail out" especially of an institution which has been such a curse on the common man. As the banks and stock markets collapse, the US Government will get dragged down with the whole mess.

But the people will still be here. Those 288 million Americans and their skills, will still be here. And like our Founding Fathers they will simply form a new government, one that starts out free of the huge debts run up by 100 years of reckless spending by the old government, a government made up, not of lawyers, but of teachers, engineers, doctors, the people who KNOW how to make a civilization work. Yes, there will be a time of confusion, as was the case when the USSR collapsed. But as was demonstrated in the new Russia, following that confusion will be a time of opportunity for all the people with the strength and courage to take advantage of it.

Bush wants a war to save the present government. And by supporting his war with our money and the blood of our children, all we buy is more of that same government.

Is it really worth the price?

Democrats pull plug on climate bill

Senate Democrats pulled the plug on climate legislation Thursday, pushing the issue off into an uncertain future ahead of midterm elections where President Barack Obama’s party is girding for a drubbing.

Rather than a long-awaited measure capping greenhouse gases — or even a more limited bill directed only at electric utilities — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will move forward next week on a bipartisan energy-only bill that responds to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and contains other more popular energy items.

“It’s easy to count to 60,” Reid said. “I could do it by the time I was in eighth grade. My point is this, we know where we are. We know we don’t have the votes [for a bill capping emissions]. This is a step forward.”

"He's anxious to get something done before we leave in August," Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said of Reid. "Given the time constraints, this probably is a realistic judgment on his part."

“We don't have the 60 votes,” said Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “So Sen. Reid's a pragmatist. So rather than take us to a situation where we don't have the votes, rather than do half-measures, let's wait until we can get it done and get it right. So I think it's a smart decision.”

The bill headed to the floor will not include a carbon cap or a renewable electricity standard, Bingaman said. Instead, it has low-hanging-fruit provisions dealing with the oil spill, Home Star energy efficiency upgrades, incentives for the conversion of trucking fleet to natural gas and the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) was visibly disappointed but said he isn’t giving up hope on getting “a decent bill” on climate within the next two weeks.

Still, he said, "the Republicans don't want to cooperate on anything. On any of these major issues they vote no, and we've got to get some Republican votes because we don't have unanimity in our caucus. So we're still hoping they decide they want to govern instead of scoring political points.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) insisted that he, too, had hope for getting some kind of climate bill through the Senate in the next two weeks. He said he spoke with Obama Thursday and that the president had “committed to work at a more intensive pace” in the days ahead.

But the writing has been on the wall all week, with advocates lowering expectations in light of continued opposition from GOP senators and some moderate Democrats.

"I don’t believe an energy bill has ever passed off the floor in less than about three weeks," Kerry said earlier Thursday during a town-hall style forum hosted by the Clean Energy Works, an umbrella advocacy organization that includes environmentalists, labor and religious groups. "The fact is this is a very complicated bill that has a lot of moving parts. I'm very realistic about that."

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The United States Is In Deep Doodoo!

Michael Rivero

The following article was first written in 1998. I am relinking it here not so much as to say "I told you so", but to point out that the long term economic future of the United States was obvious, or should have been obvious, to the people who are awarded lofty degrees and paid huge salaries to comprehend such things. Instead, the economists persisted in explaining away the visible signs of gathering troubles and earned their salaries by justifying why the policies that robbed the poor to give to the rich should continue unabated.
United States Congressional Record - March 17, 1993 - Vol. #33, page H-1303 - Speaker- Rep. James Traficant, Jr. (Ohio) addressing the House:

"Mr. Speaker, we are here now in chapter 11. Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any Bankrupt entity in world history, the U.S. Government. We are setting forth hopefully, a blueprint for our future. There are some who say it is a coroner's report that will lead to our demise."


Imagine for a moment that someone inherits a farm. Let's say that the farm has good topsoil, a good well, good breeding stock, good seed, and excellent farm equipment in good repair. Prior to passing into the control of the present owner the farm did a good business selling vegetables, meat, and dairy products to the local market, and it made a small profit.

But let us suppose for a moment that the present owner of the farm doesn't understand farming, or isn't even really interested in learning. The present owner has no objection to standing around looking good, so he stays at the farm, standing in front of it, looking good to passers by.

Of course, the bills still come in, so our farmer puts them on his credit card. When that bill comes due he uses another credit card, Then another. Pretty soon the interest payments alone are higher than his bills and the banks get nervous and call him. No problem. Our farmer sells the tractor, takes the money around to the various credit cards, the food store, the utilities, and pays off all his bills. Then he stands around in front of the farm looking good to passers-by, the lord of his domain.

Well, the bills still come in. Again the credit cards get loaded up. So, this time our farmer sells the harvester. Then later on, the cattle, then the chickens, then the seeds, then he leases the well to his neighbor and finally sells the top soil from his farm to another farm down the road whose soil is getting tired. The cash is taken around to the various creditors, the food store, the utilities, etc.

Now at this point, our farmer thinks everything is okay. The bills are paid, he has a little cash in his pocket, and everything is fine.

Of course, you know better. The farm simply does not exist any more; it's just an empty lot with a few buildings, and soon they will be gone as well. The path from the farmer's present condition to seizure of the property for unpaid taxes is a foregone conclusion, even if the farmer doesn't look far enough ahead to see it.

Poor, dumb, stupid farmer.

That farmer is our government, and our business leaders.

Just as our hypothetical farm has lost its soil, livestock, seed, and farm equipment, America has lost its manufacturing ability. Short sighted business leaders, with as little interest in manufacturing as our farmer had in farming, decided their own personal bonuses would be higher if they simply sold their factories rather that ran them. After WW2, the 27 American TV companies including Zenith, Emerson, RCA, GE, etc. led the world in TV technology. Then, the owners of the patents on TV technology decided they didn't need to dirty their hands by actually making the TV sets themselves any more, and they started selling licenses to manufacture, which the Japanese bought.

By 1987, the only remaining American TV company was Zenith. The patent holders get their money, but the American products which can be sold overseas are gone, along with the jobs to make them. (Today Zenith is owned by a Korean electronics company.)

The same happened in high-tech electronics. The integrated circuit was invented in the United States. But rather than focus on selling integrated circuits, the companies that owned that technology sold the machines to MAKE integrated circuits around the world, and now America sells very few chips anywhere. The patent holders have their money, but the cash flow from sales of manufactured goods, and the jobs that go with them, are gone. When Seymour Cray needed custom chips for his supercomputers, he had to order them from Japan.

The same thing has been happening in aviation. The airplane was invented in the United States, and through the 60s, we sold a lot of them around the world. But lately, all aircraft sales to foreign countries involve "offsets", a portion of the core technology that gets licensed to the purchasing nation and gets manufactured there. Bit by bit, the core technology gets bled off, taking with it jobs, and cash flow from the sale of those manufactured products. Along the way, the rights to manufacture American inventions outside America leak away on a steadily increasing basis. Even the mighty F-16 is now being manufactured overseas, under license.

To cover the loss of manufacturing jobs, our government has invented the catch phrase "service economy". This is the idiotic notion that we don't need to actually sell manufactured products; that we can grow and prosper our nation by doing each other's laundry for a fee. To conceal the loss of manufacturing jobs, the government has legislated into existence thousands upon thousands of useless paper-shuffling jobs, and declared their necessity by fiat. The most obvious is the income tax which has been so obfuscated by the government that half of you had to rely on an outside expert to figure out just what all those incomprehensible words really meant. By this device, the government has replaced those jobs that made products to sell with an equal number of jobs that produce nothing whatsoever of any worth, except to keep the unemployment figures down. This over-burdening of the American people with gratuitous regulations and paperwork has accomplished nothing except to obfuscate the loss of manufacturing jobs, and to transform the American character from innovators and inventors creating new products to that of minor clerks, peeking under each other's seat cushions for lost change.

So, with most of our manufacturing now gone, just what DOES America make? Trouble, mostly. With 4% of the world's population and 18% of the economy, we have 50% of all the lawyers, all looking to make a killing by looting those few industries that still call America home (like Microsoft). Kids don't want to be scientists and engineers; they've seen how little such people are valued in our country. Based on recent history, kids see the "big bucks" are in corporate law, specifically investment banking, leveraged buyouts, greenmail, junk bonds, in short what other countries describe as "trying to make money grow by shaking it side to side".

With America's ability to actually produce products that can compete on the open world market in decline, it's no wonder that the balance of trade is the problem it is. Nobody buys our export products because we just don't make that many any more, and like or not, we have to buy our appliances from the people who make them, which are NOT Americans. (When Ampex invented the VCR, they didn't even bother trying to find an American company to make it, they immediately sold the rights to Japan).

So, what do all these countries on the plus side of the trade imbalance do with their surplus billions? Well, they have been loaning it right back to us!

Our government engages in a practice politely called "deficit spending". Other terms which would aptly describe the practice include "counterfeiting" and "check kiting", but it all comes down to the same thing; spending money one does not actually have.

What would be a prison offense for a normal citizen was rendered legal for the government by the Federal Reserve Act. This was not a popular piece of legislation. In fact the Democrats had campaigned in 1912 on a platform of rejection of the creation of a private bank in charge of a fiat money system. Nevertheless, on December 23, 1913, taking advantage of the absence of congressmen opposed to the creation of a fiat monetary system during the Christmas break, the Federal Reserve Act was passed.

Years later, during the great depression, Congressman Louis T. McFadden (who served twelve years as Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency) asked for congressional investigations of criminal conspiracy to establish the privately owned 'Federal Reserve System'. He requested impeachment of Federal officers who had violated oaths of office both in establishing and directing the Federal Reserve -- imploring Congress to investigate an incredible scope of overt criminal acts by the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Banks. McFadden even suggested that the Federal Reserve deliberately triggered the great stock market crash of 1929, in order to eventually force the passage of the Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, which suspended the gold standard.

In describing the FED, McFadden remarked in the Congressional Record, House pages 1295 and 1296 on June 10, 1932:

"Mr. Chairman, 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. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government Board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. The depredations and the iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal reserve banks acting together have cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States; has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the misadministration of that law by which the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it".

Why all the fuss over the gold standard?

Well it goes back to the original Founding Fathers and the meaning of the word "dollar". "Dollar" is actually a weight measure of silver, 371.25 grains, to be exact. Our American silver dollars are actually heavier, since other metals were added for durability. But that 371.25 grains of silver WAS the dollar, matching in weight an unbroken chain of accepted monetary units that reached back through the Spanish Milled Dollar, the Dutch Daller, back to the German Thaler; the product of a silver mine which sold its product in coins of an exact weight. The Coinage Act of 1792 defined our dollar to exactly match in weight the silver dollars in use around the world, and then defined the gold dollar to be that amount of gold which would equal the worth of silver in a silver dollar, 24.75 grains, 1/15 the weight of the silver in a silver dollar.

US Silver Dollar US Gold Dollar (same scale)

So, what's wrong with this? Nothing really. When you, as a citizen, hold a silver dollar or a gold dollar in your hand, you hold that actual worth of metal. Nothing the government can do can change the worth of the money in your control.

Take the Roman Silver Denarius pictured above. The Roman Empire is long gone, but the money that Rome issued still has worth because the coins themselves had inherent worth. Long after the collapse of the empire, Roman silver coins were still used as money, because the silver in the coin itself did not depend on the issuing government for its worth.

Of course, carrying around too much coin can be bothersome, so many nations, including our own, issued paper notes as a convenience. But that paper currency of the nation was just a convenience. The gold and silver certificates were merely "claim checks" for the equivalent weight of gold or silver held in the treasury, and which would be produced on demand when the certificate was presented. But in the end, the lawful dollar of the United States was 371.25 grains of silver, or 24.75 grains of gold.

The problem with this system from the point of view of the government or the banks is that it limits the amount of money they can work with. When the bank runs out of silver or gold (or the equivalent certificates) it can no longer lend any more money with which to earn interest. When the government runs out of gold or silver (or the equivalent certificates) it can no longer spend money (just like the rest of us).

The immediate effect of ending the gold standard was that with the paper dollar no longer legally dependent on 371.25 grains of silver or 24.75 grains of gold, more paper dollars (now called "Federal Reserve Notes") could be printed, their actual worth no longer under the control of the citizens but under the control of the issuing central bank, based on the total number of dollars printed (or created as credit lines) divided by the estimated worth of the nation's assets. The more dollars which are created out of thin air, the less each one is worth.

A federal Reserve Note.

The swindle of the system is simple. The Federal Reserve Bank hires the US Treasury to print up some money. The Federal Reserve only actually pays the treasury for the cost of the printing, they do NOT pay $1 for each 1$ printed. But the Federal Reserve turns around and loans out that money (or credit line) to banks at full face value, those banks which have exhausted their deposits then loan that Federal Reserve fiat money to you, and you must repay it in the full dollar value (plus interest) in work product, even though the Federal Reserve printed that money for pennies, or created it out of thin air in a computer.

As the Federal Reserve overprints more money, the money supply inflates, and too much money starts chasing too few goods and services, which means prices go up. But contrary to the charade put on by the Federal Reserve, inflation doesn't just come and go due to some arcane sorcery. The Federal Reserve can halt inflation any time it wants to by simply shutting down those printing presses. It therefore follows that both inflation and recession are fully under the control of the Federal Reserve. This means the cycle of inflation and recession is an intentional one; a gigantic heartbeat that pumps paper certificates out to the working class, while pumping real wealth in to the owners of the banks.

Over time, that excess of printing has destroyed the value of that dollar you think you have. If you want to know by just how much, go out and try to purchase 371.25 grains of silver right now. Usually, the deterioration is gradual. Sometimes, it has to be obvious, such as the 1985 devaluation (done to halt the trade imbalance) which triggered the Japanese real-estate grab in this country.

Many politicians have attempted to reverse this process.

During the term of Abraham Lincoln, the banks demanded high interest to fund the civil war, reaching as high as 24% to 36%. Lincoln, rather than sell the country into permanent debt on the interest bearing bank notes, ordered the US Treasury to issue new legal tender popularly called Greenbacks, that funded the civil war without incurring huge interest debts. The system worked so well there was popular support for continuing the system after the end of the war, but issuance of the Greenbacks was halted after Lincoln was assassinated.

John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order 11110, requiring the Treasury Department to start printing and issuing silver certificates for the silver then remaining in the US Treasury. Kennedy understood, as did Lincoln, that by returning to the constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve System, who print paper money then loan it to the government at interest. This was the reason he signed Executive Order 11110 which called for the issuance of $4,292,893,815 in United States Notes through the U.S. Treasury rather than the Federal Reserve System.

John F. Kennedy's United States Note.

That same day, Kennedy signed a bill changing the backing of one and two dollar bills from silver to gold, adding strength to the weakened U.S. currency.

Kennedy's comptroller of the currency, James J. Saxon, had been at odds with the powerful Federal Reserve Board for some time, encouraging broader investment and lending powers for banks that were not part of the Federal Reserve system. Saxon also had decided that non-Reserve banks could underwrite state and local general obligation bonds, again weakening the dominant Federal Reserve banks".

Kennedy's E.O. was never implemented following his assassination, and shortly afterwards, United States silver coins were taken out of circulation and replaced with the copper clad slugs in use today. These two events, the failure to print new silver certificates, and the substitution of worthless slugs for our silver coins, may explain why the Warren Commission included on its panel John J. McCloy, a man with no experience in crime, law enforcement, or national security, but who had been the President of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

It should be noted that the banks themselves are still using the gold standard. Accounts are still settled between major national banks by the transfer of gold bullion.

So here we are with a bank that legally counterfeits the money you borrow but expects a full value (plus interest) repayment. But what's good for the Federal Reserve is good for the government itself, and this is where we get back into that funny word "deficit spending". The government spends more money than it takes in. It has for many years now. The Federal Reserve, being the only lawful source of this fiat money, prints up the excess cash the government needs (or manufactures a credit line in a computer). This extra cash is treated as a loan, in order to keep the government overspending from further eroding the worth of the dollar in the world market. The government (meaning the taxpayers) is on the hook for the full face value, plus interest.

But there's another problem. The government is borrowing so much money that it drives the interest rates up! You pay MORE interest on your mortgage, car loan, and credit cards, because the government cannot balance its books. That extra interest you pay is therefore another hidden tax. The government, in its "generosity", gives you a tax credit on mortgage interest that is higher because of their own borrowing!

During the 80s, as exports dropped, and jobs moved from manufacturing to lower paying "service sector" jobs, the US tax base declined. In order to keep the jobless rate from rising, a massive defense program called the Strategic Defense Initiative was cranked up, but since this program produced no exportable product, it produced no taxable sales revenues, and hence the money poured into the project accelerated the government decline into debt. Because manufacturing was on the decline, fewer start-up companies were approaching the lending institutions, so the government loosened up the rules (while increasing the insurable deposit limit) to allow "investments" in more high risk ventures, most of which turned out to be frauds, or worse, money laundering operations for drug criminals. This includes Whitewater, Flowerwood, and Castle Grande. Despite shifting the S&L loss primarily onto the taxpayers (to reassure foreign investors that the taxpayers still made America a safe place to park their surplus cash) the government plunged further into debt.

In the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush(I) administrations, the United States went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor. Many of those nations which had enjoyed huge trade surpluses started loaning that profit back to the United States with the stipulation that we work on our manufacturing, clean up our infrastructure, raise taxes, in short, clean up our act, so that investment in America makes sense!

However, we didn't quite do that.

There has been some shuffling around to try to conceal the real scope of the problem. Over the last several years, the Federal Government has been sending less tax money back to the states than it takes in in taxes. This means that the states have to borrow MORE money to cover their obligations. The net result is that the debt is being transferred to the states, to conceal its true size. The government will easily admit to a $3 trillion "publicly held" debt, grudgingly concede that it's "unfunded liability" brings that number to almost $7 trillion, but the real hard truth is that total government debt, state and federal, is now over $14 trillion dollars, or about 50,000 for every man, woman, and child inside the United States. Since 1960, the taxpayers have shelled out $15 trillion in interest payments alone, while the principal continues to rise.

Yet another stunt the government has pulled is to "borrow" from the various trust funds under its control. Some $2 billion has vanished from the trust accounts of Native Americans (presently suing the Departments of the Interior and Treasury), and nearly ¾ of a TRILLION dollars has been removed from your Social Security retirement trust fund and spent in the last 8 years.

If the government has to borrow your retirement money when things are supposed to be so good, under what conditions can it repay the money? Or is that government IOU in your retirement account merely a promise to either tax you a second time or stiff you on the benefits you thought you were paying for?

In the last 8 years, during what are supposed to be record setting good times, the Federal government has nearly DOUBLED its debt load. The estimated interest on the debt equals all the personal income tax paid by all Americans. Our government is so deep in debt that it cannot get out.

This brings us to the issue of collateral. We've borrowed so much money the lenders are getting nervous. Back during the Johnson administration Charles DeGaulle demanded the United States collateralize the loans owed to France in gold and started carting out the bullion from the treasury. This caused several other nations to demand the same and President Nixon had to slam the gold window closed or the treasury would have been emptied, since the United States was even then in debt for more money than the treasury could cover in gold.

But Nixon had to collateralize that debt somehow, and he hit upon the plan of quietly setting aside huge tracts of American land with their mineral rights in reserve to cover the outstanding debts. But since the American people were already angered over the war in Vietnam, Nixon couldn't very well admit that he was apportioning off chunks of the United States to the holders of foreign debt. So, Nixon invented the Environmental Protection Agency and passed draconian environmental laws which served to grab land with vast natural resources away from the owners and lock it away, and even more, prove to the holders of the foreign debt that US citizens were not drilling. mining, or otherwise developing those resources. From that day to this, as the government sinks deeper into debt, the government grabs more and more land, declares it a wilderness or "roadless area" or "heritage river" or "wetlands" or any one of over a dozen other such obfuscated labels, but in the end the result is the same. We The People may not use the land, in many cases are not even allowed to enter the land.

This is not about conservation, it is about collateral. YOUR land is being stolen by the government and used to secure loans the government really had no business taking out in the first place. Given that the government cannot get out of debt, and is collateralizing more and more land to avoid foreclosure, the day is not long off when the people of the United States will one day wake up and discover they are no longer citizens, but tenants.

The following map shows the current extent of all lands grabbed by the government under the guise of environmentalism.


click for full size image

In short, the United States is in deep trouble. We have lost a huge amount of our manufacturing capacity, and those products we still make do not compete well on the world market, despite the steady devaluation of the dollar. In short we have vast debts to pay and little to pay them with. Like the foolish Farmer we have sold the machinery that allowed us to prosper, and we stand around shaking our investment portfolios back and forth in the hopes that the money inside will somehow grow all by itself. It won't. It never has. The very best that can be said is that money gets moved from one person to the other.

Those nations and banks to whom we owe money have been very patient indeed with us. They know that our economies are so tightly entwined that what hurts America will hurt them. But sooner or later, possibly after a market crash, someone, in order to pay their own debts, will demand their loans to the United States be paid. Rather than get caught with "bad paper", there will be a run on the United States government.

In addition to the government debt of $14 trillion, our businesses are home to trillions more in foreign investment, kept here by the promise that the American taxpayer will be made to cover all losses. But with our manufacturing in decline and our schools producing far more lawyers than anything else, it should be obvious to the prudent observer that the American taxpayer, even if so inclined, may not be able to cover the losses of their own government, let alone a foreign investor. That has to be making them nervous as well.

This brings us to the "equities markets", most notably the stock market. Over the last several years a constant media harangue has assured us that the soaring numbers of the stock market are the sole measure of how good our economy is. But close examination of those high-priced stocks reveals that most are heavily over-valued; their price the result of market forces rather than underlying worth (earnings ability). Amazon.com, as one example, has had a terrific run-up of its stock price, even though the company itself has yet to show a profit.

The government has admitted to using covert means to prevent a market downturn; to keep the stock prices at an artificially high and overvalued level, in order to wave those impressive numbers about as "proof" that everything is okay so that the taxpayers go back to work and pay more taxes. But in order to keep those stock prices up above their actual worth, demand must be maintained to keep the prices high. In other words, NEW investors must constantly be brought into the bottom of the pyramid to keep the prices of the stocks at the top from dropping. Hence the onslaught of commercials luring neophyte investors into the stock market via "online trading". Like any Ponzi scheme, the stock market will collapse when no more new buyers can be dragged in at the bottom. As the market starts to stutter, governments (most recently Britain) have moved to dump huge reserves of gold onto the world market to depress gold prices and deter investors from deserting the stock market for gold.

Some years back I worked on the film version of "The Day The Bubble Burst", and in between playing a stock broker, I got to spend some time with the show's consultant, Mr. William Hupt, who had been on the trading floor in 1929 as it all fell apart. He still had, framed, that last strip of ticker tape that ushered in the Great Depression, and he shared some stories which have a bearing on what is going on today.

The first story Bill shared is that there had been early indications of a dangerously over-valued market, running too deep on margin, and like the Plunge Protection Team, the largest investment houses, in particular the House of Morgan, attempted to reverse the early corrections by purchasing large blocks of stock in order to create market demand and drive the prices back up. It worked all but the last time.

The second story Bill shared was that a friend of his, riding up to his office in September of 1929, overheard the elevator operator chatting about his own stock portfolio, and his investments. Something about that image of an elevator operator playing the market set off warning signals, and Bill's friend immediately liquidated his entire portfolio, just in time to miss the great crash. Many people, including the actor Charlie Chaplin, had recognized the "recruitment" of that segment of society that did NOT have risk capital as new investors as a desperate attempt to prop up an overvalued market, and got out in time to save their own personal fortunes.

In the end, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You cannot make money grow in value by shaking it back and forth from one bank to another. You cannot prosper a nation by doing each other's laundry, or filling out their government mandated and greatly obfuscated paperwork, or flinging stock certificates around which may have as little real worth as Federal Reserve Notes. To make money, to show a profit, you must make products that somebody else wants to buy, and sadly, that is a capability the United States has allowed to slip away in great measure. The "service economy" was political propaganda to make the public believe that the decline of our manufacturing ability was a good thing.

Our nation is broke, bankrupt, and having sold much of its machinery and technology (or given it away to political donors), is unable to easily return to those endeavors which once made our nation great. Our infrastructure is in decay (the percentage of roads in the US with major damage doubled last year alone), our public schools unable to produce a workforce able to function in a high-tech manufacturing environment, and those managers end engineers with manufacturing experience have in great part been lured away to other nations. The severity of our total government debt has reached a point where the promise that the taxpayers can be made to cover any foreign investment loss rings hollow, because we can no longer pay the debts our government has now.

Our nation is in trouble. We don't make many of the products we used to make. Consequently we don't have the products to sell that we used to. We don't even make most of the products we need ourselves (like that computer you're staring at this very moment). Result: we have a massive trade imbalance. Cash is flowing out of the nation, and it's not coming back in anywhere near as fast. There's no way to spin it; that is a major problem. Our nation is becoming poorer, it is hopelessly in debt, and all the artificial escalation of stock prices cannot conceal that.

And as the artificially pumped up stock market continues to decline, the true scale of the economic horror which is the product of decades of government corruption, will become apparent to all.


A very good book on the subversion of our money system is, "Money" by Jim Ewert, and is available at http://www.principiapub.com

Joe Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN) for 6 a.m. While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA) was perking, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG). He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE) and tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA).

After cooking his breakfast in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA) he sat down with his calculator (MADE IN MEXICO) to see how much he could spend today. After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA) he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY) and continued his search for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.

At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day, Joe decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL) poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE) and turned on his TV (MADE IN INDONESIA), and then wondered why he can't find a good paying job in.....AMERICA.....

US jobless claims, housing data point to worsening economy

Reports issued Thursday on initial claims for unemployment benefits and sales of previously owned homes confirm that the US economy is slowing dramatically.

The Labor Department reported that initial jobless claims for the week ended July 17 rose by 37,000 to 464,000. The number was far higher than the consensus forecast of economists. It underscored the bleak prospects for any significant reduction in the unemployment rate, now officially at 9.5 percent.

The four-week moving average of initial claims also rose, hitting 454,750, up 1,250 from the previous week. In a healthy economy with substantial hiring, initial jobless claims usually fall below 400,000.

Also on Thursday, the National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales fell 5.1 percent in June to an annual rate of 5.37 million units. It was the second consecutive monthly drop. Home sales in the US are down 26 percent from their peak in September 2005.

The sales figure followed other housing data released earlier in the week showing that the housing market recovery is collapsing. Housing starts fell in June to the lowest level since October, and homebuilder sentiment fell this month to its lowest level since April 2009.

In May, pending home sales plunged 15.9 percent from the year-earlier period to the lowest level since the National Association of Realtors began collecting statistics in 2001.

In a front-page article Wednesday headlined “Housing Market Stumbles,” the Wall Street Journal noted, “Demand for home purchase mortgages sits near a 14-year low, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, down 44 percent over the past two months.”

Underlying the renewed housing slump is the jobs crisis, the worst since the 1930s. Home sales and construction are falling despite the fact that mortgage rates are the lowest in decades and home prices have fallen sharply. But demand is low because so many people are either out of work or afraid of being laid-off, or are working fewer hours for less pay.

In addition, a quarter of homeowners are “under water,” i.e., they owe more on their mortgage than the sale price of their home. Consequently, they cannot sell their present home to move into another.

The flood of foreclosed homes is further undermining the housing market. Bloomberg wrote on Thursday, “Foreclosures and short-sales are boosting the so-called shadow inventory, and competing with owners trying to sell properties. Home seizures jumped 38 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, RealtyTrac said last week, putting lenders on pace to claim more than 1 million properties this year.”

Also on Thursday, the Conference Board reported that its index of leading economic indicators fell 0.2 percent in June. It was the second decline in three months.

“The indicators point to slower growth through the fall,” said Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board.

The release of the economic data coincided with two days of congressional testimony by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in which the central bank chief acknowledged a slowdown in what was already a torpid economic growth rate.

Presenting the Fed’s semiannual monetary policy report to Congress, Bernanke appeared Wednesday before the Senate Banking Committee and Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee. He said the US economic outlook was “somewhat weaker” than previously indicated, and focused on persistent high unemployment and the slowdown in the housing market.

On jobs, Bernanke acknowledged that the Fed expected the unemployment rate to decline even more slowly than it had previously forecast, leaving the official jobless rate at 7.0 percent to 7.5 percent at the close of 2012. The Fed forecasts the jobless rate to be between 9.2 percent and 9.5 percent in the final quarter of 2010.

He acknowledged that the pace of private payroll growth in the first half of 2010—100,000 a month, on average—is “insufficient to reduce the unemployment rate materially.”

The US central bank recently cut its estimate for US growth in 2010 from 3.2-3.7 percent to 3.0-3.5 percent. It expects the economy to pick up only slightly to 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent in 2011 and 2012.

This is a projection for, at best, years of extremely high unemployment, with all of the attendant social consequences. But what shook the stock market on Wednesday was Bernanke’s remark that the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain.” This sent the Dow tumbling, leading to a 109-point drop at the close of trading.

In his Senate testimony Wednesday, Bernanke said the Fed was prepared to take new steps in the event of the economy slipping back toward negative growth. However, he made clear that it had no plans in the near term to intervene further.

On Thursday, before the House committee, Bernanke placed more emphasis on the willingness of the Fed to take unorthodox measures to prevent deflation or a “double-dip” recession. He made clear that these measures would aim to increase the flow of cheap credit to major banks and corporations, bolstering their profits.

Bernanke implicitly indicated that the Fed would not support any measures to directly create jobs, such as a public works program, or any major government spending to provide relief for the millions of workers facing long-term unemployment, the loss of their homes, utility shutoffs, and a slide into destitution.

While he cautioned against immediately ending all forms of economic stimulus, he reiterated his repeated demand that the government formulate a medium-term plan to slash social spending in order to reduce the budget deficit.

Bernanke’s testimony Thursday, combined with more second-quarter corporate reports showing bumper profits, sparked a rally on Wall Street, with the Dow closing up by 201 points.

President Obama has repeatedly declared that the economy is “headed in the right direction.” His administration has dropped even its minimal proposals to aid financially desperate state and local governments and subsidize job creation.

It is pursuing the ruling class policy of using mass unemployment to drive down the wages and living standards of the working class, and preparing sweeping austerity measures to make working people pay for the budget and debt crisis of US capitalism.

While workers are suffering the impact of this policy, big business is benefiting handsomely. Corporations registered record profit gains in the first quarter of 2010, and they are expected to rise another 19.3 percent this quarter, as compared to a year ago. The profit surge is largely the result of downsizing, wage cutting and speedup.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Roger Altman, an investment banker and deputy treasury secretary in the first Clinton administration, defended Obama against criticisms from some business leaders by citing his pro-corporate record. He pointed out that profits are up 41 percent since Obama was elected and the Dow has risen by more than 28 percent over the same period.


Barry Grey is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Barry Grey

No Wonder the Outlook for the Economy is "Unusually Uncertain" ... the Fed is Killing It

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified today that the outlook for the economy is "unusually uncertain".

That's not surprising.

Nothing has changed since I made the following points last December.

High-Level Fed Officials Slam Bernanke

Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn conceded that the government's actions "will reduce [companies'] incentive to be careful in the future." In other words, he's admitting that the government's actions will encourage financial companies to make even riskier gambles in the future.

Kansas City Fed President and veteran Fed official Thomas Hoenig said:

Too big has failed....

The sequence of [the government's] actions, unfortunately, has added to market uncertainty. Investors are understandably watching to see which institutions will receive public money and survive as wards of the state...

Any financial crisis leaves a stream of losses among the various participants, and these losses must ultimately be borne by someone. To start the resolution process, management responsible for the problems must be replaced and the losses identified and taken. Until these actions are taken, there is little chance to restore market confidence and get credit markets flowing. It is not a question of avoiding these losses, but one of how soon we will take them and get on to the process of recovery....

Many of the [government's current policy revolves around the idea of] "too big to fail" .... History, however, may show us a different experience. When examining previous financial crises, both in other countries as well as the United States, large institutions have been allowed to fail. Banking authorities have been successful in placing new and more responsible managers and directions in charge and then reprivatizing them. There is also evidence suggesting that countries that have tried to avoid taking such steps have been much slower to recover, and the ultimate cost to taxpayers has been larger...

The current head of the Philadelphia fed bank, Charles Plosser, disagrees with Bernanke's strategy of the endless printing-press and ever-increasing fed balance sheet:

Plosser urged the Fed to "proceed with caution" with the new policy. Others outside the Fed are much more strident and want plans in place immediately to reverse it. They believe an inflation storm is already in train.***

Bernanke argued that focusing on the size of the balance sheet misses the point, arguing the Fed's various asset purchase programs are not easily summarized in a single number.


But Plosser said that the growth of the Fed's balance sheet was a key metric.

"It is not appropriate to ignore quantitative metrics in this new policy environment," Plosser said...

Plosser is bringing the spotlight right back to the Fed's balance sheet.

"The size of the balance sheet does offer a possible nominal anchor for monitoring the volume of our liquidity provisions," Plosser said.

The former head of the Fed's Open Market Operations says the bailout might make things worse. Specifically, the former head of the Fed's open market operation - the key Fed agency which has been loaning hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street companies and banks - was quoted in Bloomberg as saying:

"Every time you tinker with this delicate system even small changes can create big ripples,'' said Dino Kos, former head of the New York Fed's open-market operations . . . "This is the impossible situation they are in. The risks are that the government's $700 billion purchase of assets disturbs markets even more.''

And William Poole, who recently left his post as president of the St. Louis Fed, is essentially calling Bernanke a communist:

Poole said he was very concerned that the Fed could simply lend money to anyone, without constraint.

In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War era, economies were inefficient because they had a soft-budget constraint. If a firm got into trouble, the banking system would give them more money, Poole said.

The current situation at the Fed seems eerily similar, he said.

"What is discipline - where are the hard choices - when does Fed say our resources are exhausted?" Poole asked.

But the strongest criticism may be from the former Vice President of Dallas Federal Reserve, who said that the failure of the government to provide more information about the bailout could signal corruption. As ABC writes:

Gerald O'Driscoll, a former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption.

"Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here," he said.

Of course, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker has also strongly criticized current Fed policies.

Global Agencies Slam Bernanke

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) - called "the central banks' central bank" - has slammed the Fed for blowing bubbles and then "using gimmicks and palliatives" which "will only make things worse".

As the Telegraph wrote in June 2007:

The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood...

The BIS, the ultimate bank of central bankers, pointed to a confluence a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system...

The bank said it was far from clear whether the US would be able to shrug off the consequences of its latest imbalances ...

"Sooner or later the credit cycle will turn and default rates will begin to rise," said the bank.

A year later, in June 2008, the Telegraph wrote:

A year ago, the Bank for International Settlements startled the financial world by warning that we might soon face challenges last seen during the onset of the Great Depression. This has proved frighteningly accurate...

[BIS economist] Dr White says the US sub-prime crisis was the "trigger", not the cause of the disaster.

Indeed, BIS slammed the Fed and other central banks for blowing the bubble, failing to regulate the shadow banking system, and then using gimmicks which will only make things worse. As the 2008 Telegraph article notes:

In a pointed attack on the US Federal Reserve, it said central banks would not find it easy to "clean up" once property bubbles have burst...

Nor does it exonerate the watchdogs. "How could such a huge shadow banking system emerge without provoking clear statements of official concern?"

"The fundamental cause of today's emerging problems was excessive and imprudent credit growth over a long period. Policy interest rates in the advanced industrial countries have been unusually low," he said.

The Fed and fellow central banks instinctively cut rates lower with each cycle to avoid facing the pain. The effect has been to put off the day of reckoning...

"Should governments feel it necessary to take direct actions to alleviate debt burdens, it is crucial that they understand one thing beforehand. If asset prices are unrealistically high, they must fall. If savings rates are unrealistically low, they must rise. If debts cannot be serviced, they must be written off.

"To deny this through the use of gimmicks and palliatives will only make things worse in the end," he said.

In other words, BIS slammed the easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, and the failure to regulate the shadow banking system.

More dramatically, BIS slammed "the use of gimmicks and palliatives", and said that anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts "will only make things worse".

But Bernanke and the other central bankers (as well as Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisors and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the others in control of American and British and French and Japanese and German and virtually every other country's economic policy) ignored BIS' advice in 2007 and 2008, and they are still ignoring it today.

Instead, they are doing everything they can to (2) prop up asset prices by trying to blow a new bubble by giving banks trillions, (2) re-write accounting and reporting rules to let the big banks and other giants keep bad debts on their books (or in sivs or other "second sets of books") and to hide the fact that they are bad debts, and (3) encourage consumers to spend spend spend!

"The world's most prestigious financial body", "the ultimate bank of central bankers" has condemned Bernanke and all of the other G-8 central banks, and stripped bare their false claims that the crash wasn't their fault or that they are now doing the right thing to turn the economy around.

As Spiegel wrote in July of this year:

White and his team of experts observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies. In their view, the reason for the lack of restraint in the financial markets was that there was simply too much cheap money available on the market...

As far back as 2003, White implored central bankers to rethink their strategies, noting that instability in the financial markets had triggered inflation, the "villain" in the global economy...

In the restrained world of central bankers, it would have been difficult for White to express himself more clearly...

It was probably the biggest failure of the world's central bankers since the founding of the BIS in 1930. They knew everything and did nothing. Their gigantic machinery of analysis kept spitting out new scenarios of doom, but they might as well have been transmitted directly into space...

In their report, the BIS experts derisively described the techniques of rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's as "relatively crude" and noted that "some caution is in order in relation to the reliability of the results."...

In January 2005, the BIS's Committee on the Global Financial System sounded the alarm once again, noting that the risks associated with structured financial products were not being "fully appreciated by market participants." Extreme market events, the experts argued, could "have unanticipated systemic consequences."

They also cautioned against putting too much faith in the rating agencies, which suffered from a fatal flaw. Because the rating agencies were being paid by the companies they rated, the committee argued, there was a risk that they might rate some companies too highly and be reluctant to lower the ratings of others that should have been downgraded.

These comments show that the central bankers knew exactly what was going on, a full two-and-a-half years before the big bang. All the ingredients of the looming disaster had been neatly laid out on the table in front of them: defective rating agencies, loans repackaged to the point of being unrecognizable, dubious practices of American mortgage lenders, the risks of low-interest policies. But no action was taken. Meanwhile, the Fed continued to raise interest rates in nothing more than tiny increments...

The Fed chairman was not even impressed by a letter the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America (MICA), a trade association of US mortgage providers, sent to the Fed on Sept. 23, 2005. In the letter, MICA warned that it was "very concerned" about some of the risky lending practices being applied in the US real estate market. The experts even speculated that the Fed might be operating on the basis of incorrect data. Despite a sharp increase in mortgages being approved for low-income borrowers, most banks were reporting to the Fed that they had not lowered their lending standards. According to a study MICA cited entitled "This Powder Keg Is Going to Blow," there was no secondary market for these "nuclear mortgages."...

William White and his Basel team were dumbstruck. The central bankers were simply ignoring their warnings. Didn't they understand what they were being told? Or was it that they simply didn't want to understand?

The head of the World Bank also says:

Central banks [including the Fed] failed to address risks building in the new economy. They seemingly mastered product price inflation in the 1980s, but most decided that asset price bubbles were difficult to identify and to restrain with monetary policy. They argued that damage to the 'real economy' of jobs, production, savings, and consumption could be contained once bubbles burst, through aggressive easing of interest rates. They turned out to be wrong.

Economists Slam Bernanke

Stephen Roach (former chief economist for Morgan Stanley, and now director of Morgan Stanley Asia) is one of the most influential and respected American economists. Roach told Charlie Rose recently that we have had terrible Federal Reserve policy for the past 12 years under Greenspan and Bernanke, that they concocted hair-brained theories (for example, that we should let the boom and bust cycle occur, but then "clean up the mess" once things fall apart), and that we really need to reform the Fed.

Specifically, here's the must-read portion of the interview:

STEPHEN ROACH: And what’s missing in the debate that drives me nuts is going back to the very function of central banking that’s at the core of our financial system. Do we have the right model for the Fed to go forward? And, you know, I think we’ve minimized the role that the custodians, the stewards of our financial
system, the Federal Reserve, played in leading to this crisis and in making sure that we will never have this again. I think we’ve had horrible central banking in the United States for the past dozen of years. I mean, we elevate our central bankers, we probably .

CHARLIE ROSE: From Greenspan to Bernanke.

STEPHEN ROACH: Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE: Both.

STEPHEN ROACH: We call them maestro, and, you know, we make them
sound larger than life. And, you know, and the fact is, they condoned
policies that took us from one bubble to another. They failed to live up
to their regulatory responsibility granted them by law. They concocted new
theories to explain why these things could go on forever, and they harbored
the belief, mistakenly in my view, that monetary policy is too big and
blunt an instrument, and so you just bring it in to clean up the mess
afterwards rather than prevent a mess ahead of time. Well, look at the
mess we’re in right now. We need a different approach here. We really do.

Leading economist Anna Schwartz, co-author of the leading book on the Great Depression with Milton Friedman, told the Wall Street journal that the Fed's entire strategy in dealing with the financial crisis is wrong. Specifically, the Fed is treating it as a liquidity problem, when it is really an insolvency crisis.

Moreover, prominent Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman says that the Federal Reserve is primarily to blame for the financial crisis:

"I am convinced that the misbehavior of some would have been much rarer -- and far less damaging to our economy -- if the Federal Reserve and, to a lesser extent, other supervisory authorities, had measured up to their responsibilities ...

Kaufman directly criticized former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for not using his position to dissuade big banks and others from taking big risks.

"Alan Greenspan spoke about irrational exuberance only as a theoretical concept, not as a warning to the market to curb excessive behavior," Kaufman said. "It is difficult to believe that recourse to moral suasion by a Fed chairman would be ineffective."

Partly because the Fed did not strongly oppose the repeal in 1999 of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, more large financial conglomerates that were "too big to fail" have formed, Kaufman said, citing a factor that has made the global credit crisis especially acute.

"Financial conglomerates have become more and more opaque, especially about their massive off-balance-sheet activities," he said. "The Fed failed to rein in the problem."...

"Much of the recent extreme financial behavior is rooted in faulty monetary policies," he said. "Poor policies encourage excessive risk taking."

Economist Marc Faber says that central bankers are money printers who create bubbles, and that the system would be much better now if the Fed hadn't intervened. Specifically, Faber says that - if the Fed hadn't intervened - the system would be cleaned out, the system would be healthier because debt load and burden on taxpayers would be reduced.

Economist Jane D'Arista has shown that the Fed has failed miserably at its main task: providing a "counter-cyclical" influence (that is, taking the punch bowl away before the party gets too wild).

The Fed has also failed miserably in its role as regulator of banks and their affiliates. As well-known economist James Galbraith says:

The Federal Reserve has never been an effective regulator for the straightforward reason that it is dominated by economists and bankers and not by dedicated skeptics who make bank regulation a full-time profession.

As PhD economist Steve Keen has pointed out, the Fed (along with Treasury) has also given money to the wrong people to kick-start the economy.

Unemployment

The Federal Reserve is mandated by law to maximize employment. The relevant statute states:

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy's long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

However, PhD economist Dean Baker says:

The country now has almost 25 million people who are unemployed or underemployed as a result of the Fed's disastrous policies. Millions of people are losing their homes and tens of millions are losing their life savings. The country is likely to lose more than $6 trillion in output ($20,000 per person) due to the Fed's inept job performance.

The Fed could have stemmed the unemployment crisis by demanding that banks lend more as a condition to the various government assistance programs, but Mr. Bernanke failed to do so.

Ryan Grim argues that the Fed might have broken the law by letting unemployment rise in order to keep inflation low:

The Fed is mandated by law to maximize employment, but focuses on inflation -- and "expected inflation" -- at the expense of job creation. At itsmost recent meeting, board members bluntly stated that they feared banks might increase lending, which they worried could lead to inflation.

Board members expressed concern "that banks might seek to reduce appreciably their excess reserves as the economy improves by purchasing securities or by easing credit standards and expanding their lending substantially. Such a development, if not offset by Federal Reserve actions, could give additional impetus to spending and, potentially, to actual and expected inflation." That summary was spotted by Naked Capitalism and is included in a summary of the minutes of the most recent meeting...

Suffering high unemployment in order to keep inflation low cuts against the Fed's legal mandate. Or, to put it more bluntly, it may be illegal.

In fact, the unemployment situation is getting worse, and many leading economists say that - under Mr. Bernanke's leadership - America is suffering a permanentdestruction of jobs.

For example, JPMorgan Chase’s Chief Economist Bruce Kasman told Bloomberg:

[We've had a] permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs in industries from housing to finance.

The chief economists for Wells Fargo Securities, John Silvia, says:

Companies “really have diminished their willingness to hire labor for any production level,” Silvia said. “It’s really a strategic change,” where companies will be keeping fewer employees for any particular level of sales, in good times and bad, he said.

And former Merrill Lynch chief economist David Rosenberg writes:

The number of people not on temporary layoff surged 220,000 in August and the level continues to reach new highs, now at 8.1 million. This accounts for 53.9% of the unemployed — again a record high — and this is a proxy for permanent job loss, in other words, these jobs are not coming back. Against that backdrop, the number of people who have been looking for a job for at least six months with no success rose a further half-percent in August, to stand at 5 million — the long-term unemployed now represent a record 33% of the total pool of joblessness.

And see this.

Leverage

The Fed says that we should reduce leverage, but is doing everything in its power toincrease leverage.

Specifically, the New York Federal published a report in July entitled "The Shadow Banking System: Implications for Financial Regulation".

One of the main conclusions of the report is that leverage undermines financial stability:

Securitization was intended as a way to transfer credit risk to those better able to absorb losses, but instead it increased the fragility of the entire financial system by allowing banks and other intermediaries to “leverage up” by buying one another’s securities. In the new, post-crisis financial system, the role of securitization will likely be held in check by more stringent financial regulation and by the recognition that it is important to prevent excessive leverage and maturity mismatch, both of which can undermine financial stability.

And as a former economist at the New York Fed, Richard Alford, wrote recently:

On Friday, William Dudley, President of FRBNY, gave an excellent presentation on the financial crisis. The speech was a logically-structured, tightly-reasoned, and succinct retrospective of the crisis. It took one step back from the details and proved a very useful financial sector-wide perspective. The speech should be read by everyone with an interest in the crisis. It highlights the often overlooked role of leverage and maturity mismatches even as its stated purpose was examining the role of liquidity.

While most analysts attributed the crisis to either specific instruments, or elements of the de-regulation, or policy action, Dudley correctly identified the causes of the crisis as the excessive use of leverageand maturity mismatches embedded in financial activities carried out off the balance sheets of the traditional banking system. The body of the speech opens with: “..this crisis was caused by the rapid growth of the so-called shadow banking system over the past few decades and its remarkable collapse over the past two years.”

In fact, every independent economist has said that too much leverage was one of the main causes of the current economic crisis.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen said recently that it’s “far from clear” whether the Fed should use interest rates to stem a surge in financial leverage, and urged further research into the issue.“Higher rates than called for based on purely macroeconomic conditions may help forestall a potentially damaging buildup of leverage and an asset-price boom”.

And on September 24th, Congressman Keith Ellison wrote a letter to Mr. Bernanke and Geithner stating:

As you know, excessive leverage was a key component of the financial crisis. Investment banks leveraged their balance sheets to stratospheric levels by using short-term wholesale financing (like repurchase agreements and commercial paper). Meanwhile, some entities regulated as bank holding companies (BHCs) used off-balance-sheet entities to warehouse risky assets, thereby evading their regulatory capital requirements. These entities’ reliance on short-term debt to fund the purchase of oftentimes illiquid and risky assets made them susceptible to a classic bank panic. The key difference was that this panic wasn’t a run on deposits by scared individuals, but a run on collateral by sophisticated counterparties.

The Treasury highlights this very problem in its policy statement before the recent summit of G-20 finance ministers in London. To address this problem, the Treasury advocates stronger capital and liquidity standards for banking firms, including “a simple, non-risk-based leverage constraint.” The U.S. is one of only a few countries that already has leverage requirements for banks. Leverage requirements supplement risk-based capital requirements that federal banking regulators have in place pursuant to the Basel II Accord, an international capital agreement. While important features of our system of financial regulation, leverage requirements only apply to banks and bank holding companies and therefore have not covered a wide array of financial institutions, including many that are systemically important. Moreover, leverage requirements have generally not captured the considerable risks associated with off-balance-sheet activities.

Of course, the Administration looks to address the shortcomings in the existing regulatory system through a proposal to regulate large, systemically-significant financial institutions as Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies (FHCs). Building upon its existing authority as the consolidated supervisor of all BHCs (which includes FHCs), the Federal Reserve would be responsible for overseeing and regulating the Tier 1 FHCs under the plan. In the legislative draft of the proposal, the Federal Reserve would have the authority to prescribe capital requirements and other prudential standards for these institutions that are stronger than those for all other BHCs. To that point, the text specifically says, “The prudential standards shall be more stringent than the standards applicable to bank holding companies to reflect the potential risk posed to financial stability by United States Tier 1 financial holding companies and shall include, but not be limited to—(A) risk-based capital requirements; (B) leverage limits; (C) liquidity requirements; and (D) overall risk management requirements.”

The application of leverage limits – as advanced by the Treasury’s G-20 policy statement and by the Administration’s financial regulatory reform plan – is a simple and elegant way to limit risk at specific financial institutions (and within the overall financial system). The financial crisis has underscored the importance of leverage requirements and manifested the problems associated with relying upon risk-based capital requirements alone ...

Nevertheless, there are some open questions regarding exactly how a leverage requirement should be applied. Some scholars and policy experts have advocated putting in place a leverage requirement for banks and other financial institutions that is set in statute. As Congress moves forward on comprehensive financial regulatory reform, it may consider such a requirement. I would therefore be interested to hear your views regarding the wisdom of such an approach.

As you know, setting capital standards requires decisions regarding what institutions would be covered, how capital would be defined, and what levels the requirements would be set. In light of that, what specific difficulties would you anticipate Congress facing with respect to specifying such a requirement? In addition, would a statutory requirement be too inflexible and place too many constraints on regulators with respect to refining regulatory capital requirements and negotiating with bank regulators from other countries?

On November 13th, Mr. Bernanke responded to Ellison (I received a copy of the letter from a Congressional source):

The Board's authority and flexibility in establishing capital requirements, including leverage requirements, have been key to the Board's ability to require additional capital where needed based on a banking organization's risk profile. One of the lessons learned in the recent financial crisis is the need for financial supervisors to have the ability to react quickly to changing circumstances, as in the capital assessments conducted in the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program. The Board and other federal banking agencies initiated this program to conduct a comprehensive, forward-looking assessment of the capital positions ofthe nation's 19 largest bank holding companies (BHCs). The Board's authority to mandate specific levels of capital was critical to this exercise because each BHC had a unique set of risks and circumstances that demanded careful supervisory scrutiny and evaluation in order to identify the amount of capital appropriate for its safe and sound operation. The Board required corrective actions on a case-by-case basis and continues to assess the capital positions ofthese institutions as well as all others under its supervision.

We note that in other contexts, statutorily prescribed minimum leverage ratios have not necessarily served prudential regulators of financial institutions well. Previously, the minimum capital requirements for the housing government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (collectively, "GSEs") were fixed in statute; the risk-based capital requirement for the GSEs was based on a stress test that was also set forth in statute; and the GSE's regulator, the Director ofthe Office of Financial Housing Enterprise Oversight (the predecessor agency to the Federal Housing Finance Authority) did not have the authority to establish additional capital requirements for the GSEs. This limitation was different from the authority that the federal banking agencies have to set the leverage and risk-based capital requirements for banking organizations. In 2008, Congress enacted the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which created FHFA and empowered it to establish additional minimum leverage and risk-based capital requirements for the GSEs.

With regard to the Board and other U.S. banking agencies' efforts to join with international supervisors to strengthen capital requirements for internationally active banking organizations, the Basel Committee is working on proposals for an international supplement to minimum risk-based capital ratios. While this work is in process, it is likely that these efforts will take the form of a minimum leverage ratio. It will be important for the international regulatory community to carefully calibrate the aggregate effect ofthis initiative, along with other efforts underway that are intended to strengthen capital requirements, to ensure that they protect against future financial crises while not raising capital requirements to such a degree that the availability of credit to support economic growth is unduly constrained. The current authority and flexibility the Board has to establish and modify leverage ratios as a banking organization regulator is very important to the successful participation of the Board in the process of establishing and calibrating an international leverage ratio.

The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program Mr. Bernanke refers to were the infamous "stress tests". There's just one little problem: the stress tests were a complete complete sham.

In reality, the Fed has been one the biggest enablers for increased leverage. As anyone who has looked at Mr. Bernanke and Geithner's actions will tell you, many of the government's programs are aimed at trying to re-start securitization and the "shadow banking system", and to prop up asset prices for highly-leveraged financial products.

Indeed, Mr. Bernanke said in February:

In an effort to restart securitization markets to support the extension of credit to consumers and small businesses, we joined with the Treasury to announce the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF).

And he said it again in September:

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF ... has helped restart the securitization markets for various types of consumer and small business credit. Securitization markets are an important source of credit, and their virtual shutdown during the crisis has reduced credit availability for many borrowers.

Has the Fed Manipulated any Markets?

There are allegations that the Fed has manipulated the markets.

Trillions in Unnecessary Interest to the American People

Many people - including former analyst for the U.S. Treasury Richard Cook - argue that credit is too important a function to be left to the private banks. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told Congress recently:

If the Federal Reserve were made a fully public body, it would be an acceptable alternative.

Bloomberg News columnist Matthew Lynn writes:

The U.K. government needs to start thinking about what it will do with all the banks it now owns. The answer is simple: Hand them to the people...

Instead of selling the stakes it acquired in the financial system to other banks, or listing the shares on the stock market, it could create mutually owned societies. Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc could be a people’s bank, owned by everyone.That would ensure more diversity, competition and stability, all goals just as worthy as getting back the money Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government spent on bank rescues...

Michael Moore recommends that the American people demand:

Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

As Moore notes, the state of North Dakota already has such a bank, and - because of that - North Dakota is just about the only state which is not running a huge deficit.

PhD economist and candidate for Florida governor Farid Khavari wants to create aBank of the State of Florida, to create credit without burdening the state and its citizens with high interest charges by private banks. See this for details.

If the power to create credit were taken away from the Federal Reserve system and its private banks and given back to the government (as the Constitution envisioned), then American taxpayers would save hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars in unnecessary interest charges in paying off the national debt, as the government would not have to pay interest to finance its debt (sovereign nations such as the U.S. and England have the power to create credit and money; see this, this, this, andthis).

Failure to Disclose Who Received Bailout Money

The Fed continues to fail to fully disclose who received trillions in bailout money. Because the economy will not recover until trust is restored, and trust cannot be restored unless there is transparency, this is a big deal.


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