Bob Chapman: “We Will Watch Obama Like A Hawk”

From The International Forecaster.

Congratulations, America. You are now officially the Obamanation. Not that you had any other realistic choices. And the only other viable alternative, McCain, was no better than Obama. He will now be forced to do as he is told under threat of exposure, and will have no independent latitude to make decisions concerning anything which the Illuminati care about. Biden will be his handler just as Cheney was, and continues to be, Caligula’s handler. In fact, that’s why Biden, a fervent and hardened Illuminist, was chosen as VP.

The October Surprise also explains why Palin was chosen as VP for McCain. McCain and Palin were never seriously in contention due to the coming October Surprise, so this gave the Illuminists a chance to cater to the Christian Right without any worries about Palin ever becoming President in the event that McCain could no longer serve in that capacity. Once again, the naive and fawning Christian Right got all excited over being patronized in yet another false-flag overture to Christians. The Palin nomination was intended as a plug for incumbent traitors in Congress who had electorates filled with Christian voters. The idea was to energize these Christian voters so as to help these incumbents get reelected. In this manner, the evil Illuminists attempted to keep the best government officials that money could buy in office, while the government officials who were up for reelection attempted to keep their established system of embedded graft and corruption going. Apparently, despite all that has happened, the Christian Right still can’t recognize a wolf in sheep’s clothing, nor are they able to perceive when they are being led down a garden path. With that kind of gullible leadership, Christianity is doomed in the US. In time, we will become just like Europe, unless God intervenes with an Exodus-like series of miracles to spark a Christian revival, because that is what it will probably take to wake up our sleeping Christian leaders.

We would like to rejoice with our black citizens about the election of our first black President, but we believe that this victory will be bittersweet, or perhaps even Pyrrhic in nature. Had Martin Luther King been elected, we could have rejoiced with you. But in case you hadn’t noticed, Mr. King, whose thoughts and philosophy were the antithesis of those held by the Illuminati, ended up being assassinated by them, while by contrast, Mr. Obama, an elitist bootlicker who surrounds himself with upper tier Illuminist advisors like Brzezinski, Buffett, Volcker, Rubin and Anderson, and who kow-tows to the same evil Illuminist scum who are financing his Jimmy-Carter-like campaign out of obscurity, ended up being elected President of the United States. This shows you, in no uncertain terms, how corrupt the system really is.

We judge people by the content of their character as Dr. King suggested, and based on Mr. Obama’s campaign associations alone, we would have to conclude that his character is not a good one. His support of Fannie and Freddie in the face of their obvious bankruptcy, and his number one spot as the target of Fannie and Freddie campaign contribution largesse, puts the icing on the cake, as does his support of Mr. Odinga, whose attempted coup in Kenya has resulted in the destruction of 800 Christian churches and the murders of hundreds of Christian Kenyans, events which were totally suppressed by the fane-stream media. He is not Dr. King. In fact, he is the precise opposite of Dr. King, who preferred peace over militancy.

Worse yet, we note that the current group of Illuminati are the most virulent racists of all time. They make Hitler look like a civil rights leader. What may be happening here is that these fiends are trying to associate what will be the worst economic, social and political times ever suffered by Americans, which these elitists have malevolently and intentionally orchestrated to bring America to its knees and to pave the way for world government, with a black Presidency. In one brilliant master stroke, they will take all the misery they have created to push us into a corporatist, fascist police state, and place it on the head of a black President. In addition, they will make sure that his Presidency is a disaster and that it does not succeed. Obama will be in over his head, and due to his compromised position regarding his citizenship, he will do whatever they tell him to do, and none of it will work. That is because it is not supposed to work. They want to bring you to your knees so you will bow down to the new self-proclaimed masters of the universe as the old Goldilocks Matrix is discarded and the new corporatist, fascist police state is substituted in its place. Our question is: Does Obama know this, or is he about to get the surprise of his life? Is he a patsy, or is he a player? If he is trying to be a player, we can assure him he will never be accepted by the masters of virulent racism. Note how well this association of national disaster with a black Presidency will play into the rhetoric of white supremacists. White supremacists will be in state of nirvana.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, the sheople are conditioned to come bleating to the voting polls on Election Day to cast their vote for reprobate A, or for reprobate B. They think they are making a choice, but for most part, in the important campaigns like President of the US and many other major state and federal elective positions, the choice has already been made for them. Pick Illuminist Skull and Bones candidate A, or pick Illuminist Skull and Bones candidate B, ala Bush against Kerry. Either way, we win. Candidate A will promote items “a” through “m” of our agenda, and candidate B will promote items “n” through “z” of our agenda. Thus, ergo, our agenda is always moving forward, no matter who gets into office. Come, come, our little sheople. Come into the voting booths and choose your poison, errrrrrr, politician. (Bah-ah-ah-ah-ah). Come, come, our little sheople. Pick the person who will slaughter you. (Baaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!) Oh, how silly of us. Did we say “slaughter?” Oh, we are so very sorry, we meant to say “water.” That’s right, pick the person who will water you. Please forgive us for that little Freudian slip. (Bah-ah-ah-ah-ah).

The candidates will always tell you what you want to hear, and then they will do exactly as they are told by their Illuminist handlers, which is usually quite different from what was promised during campaign rhetoric. That is why there is not a dime’s bit of difference between Jackasses and Dumbos. They must do as they are told, or they are sent on a trip to Dallas, or on a plane ride over Martha’s Vineyard.

Politicians blab away, talking about what is on their party’s agenda, and then they are told what to do by those in our shadow government who run the whole agenda, which is of course divided between the two parties. We promise Mr. Obama that we will never listen to what he says, but will we watch what he does like a hawk. We will burn away all the Illuminist lies and webs of deceit which are woven around his actions to obscure and to obfuscate their true nature and purpose. We will give him a chance like anyone else and we will be his supporter if he is honest and forthright. But we will be his worst nightmare if he tries to get “cute” with the American people. We will expose what he is doing and lay it bare to the American public. If he is not being honest we will see right through it, and then tell you, our subscribers, how things really are. This is what we have done over the course of the past ten Presidential Administrations preceding Obama’s coming Administration, and is what we will continue to do. Remember, Mr. Obama, we have been doing this for over 50 years and we know their agenda and how they operate far better than you do. We can also assure you that they are not telling you everything they plan to do. You could not take the shock. You might even be enraged. They will tell you what is coming on an as-needed basis.

Obama will now put the finishing touches on the destruction of America which was started in earnest under the previous trilogy of traitors, or triad of trouble, which commenced with the Administration of Bohemian Bush, Sr., continued with vigor under Slick Willie Clinton, and then was nearly completed during the epically catastrophic Caligula administration, which we note is still not finished with its skullduggery, and won’t be until Caligula leaves office, if ever. Could it be that Obama be booted out based on his citizenship issues, thus enraging black citizens by dispossessing them, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and leading to riots, civil unrest and martial law, which would mean that Caligula would get to stay in office until Biden took over. Perhaps it turns out that Biden, and not McCain or Obama, was the real Manchurian Candidate after all. What happens when a standing President declares martial law, the President-elect is ousted, and the Vice-President-elect takes the President-elects place? Who prevails? Bush or Biden? Either way, we lose. We note that the last thing Bush wants is to leave power and not have the ability to stop another Administration, or a people’s committee, from conducting a real 911 investigation.

The above are just a few of the possible scenarios, which the Illuminists could force on us in order to implement martial law and a feudal, Orwellian police state. Who knows what could happen as long as these Illuminist sociopaths are running our shadow government? Never underestimate the cleverness of these megalomaniacal, satanic trillionaires, whose intelligence is powered by supernatural forces of evil and darkness. Next comes another major war to distract us from the destruction of our economy, and to destroy our military so we have no defense against foreign troops or against both foreign and domestic mercenaries. We also note that Obama has promised a new national draft so that your children get to be cannon fodder for the fun and profit of the US military-industrial complex and so they also get to become the objects of persecution and terrorist retribution overseas as they are forced to stick their noses into everyone else’s business where they do not belong.

Even if they end the war in Iraq and divvy it up with big oil while retaining a mercenary force, rest assured that they will move on to the next war or escalation in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, in the Balkans, or on the Russian border. Who knows with these maniacs? This is the end of our society as we know it. This is the Fall of the House of Usher.

The prices of gold and silver futures have been suppressed to such an extent by the Illuminists within the Treasury Department that there is a stampede out of gold and silver futures, an event that could lead to default. As you all know physical gold and silver are in short supply and we are seeing higher premiums. At the same time the rigged futures market is just the opposite. All throughout history good money, gold, has driven out bad, fiat, and that is why the gold and silver futures market will either collapse because no one will play anymore, or they will default as a result of inability to deliver.

Gold is a 2-edged sword. Gold and silver go up with inflation and hyperinflation and gold also goes up or holds its own in deflation in a flight to quality.
We have been in the credit crisis for 15 months and the US and world economies are headed at breakneck speed into deep recession. We have stagflation, inflation and stagnation and it is going to get considerably worse as we head toward eventual deflation. Personal consumption expenditures are falling, as is GDP, which in the third quarter finally entered the minus column. We have a rigged rally in the dollar as consumption falls and government expenditures climb. Long before this is over the part of GDP consisting of personal consumption will fall from 70% to 72% to the long-term mean of 64.5% and that alone will cripple the economy. Although we see it going into the 50s as depression takes hold a few years from now. Our government and Wall Street are orchestrating a less severe recession to keep you spending and to keep you in the rigged stock market. As a result you are talked into a bailout package for banks and Wall Street. It doesn’t work and over 80% of Americans are against the package because they know what is going on. They are listening to alternative radio and reading what is on the Internet. In spite of that a purchased or compromised Congress give the corrupt Illuminists what they wanted. It must also be remembered the administration told congressmen that if we didn’t have such legislation that they’d impose Martial law. That is what corporate fascist government is all about.

We are already in a severe recession. All of our government’s statistics are bogus. The bailout was for the most part for money center banks, the big financial conglomerates and transnational corporations. Those funds went to the insiders, not to smaller institutions. They were for the crime syndicate, the corrupt Illuminist mafia. The next step after the election is the monetization of money and credit and horrible hyperinflation. Soon the dollar short covering will be history. Libor has already fallen and is back in its normal place. Credit derivatives and credit default swaps has produced a demand for dollars for settlement payouts. That will soon end as well. Fifteen months ago these derivatives began to fail and that systemic failure is ongoing. It will end in the complete collapse of the dollar.

This is the same barbaric horde that just sent the commodity market down almost 60%. They are now waiting to take it back up again to plunder the public once more. They bashed commodities and gold and silver because the rush for real assets had to be destroyed even though it was temporary. As a result there was a rush into physical gold and silver products, a resultant shortage developed. The elitists saw that and not wanting more physical gold in the publics’ hands the mints in Johannesburg, Canada, the US and Mexico shut down. Do you really think that was coincidence? They do not want gold and silver attractive because they are going to hyper inflate. At least for the next two to three years inflation is going to rage. Money and credit are still expanding at 12-1/2% and inflation is 12-1/2%. What deflationists do not seem to grasp is that the elitists will keep the system running because they do not want a crash until they can get a major war underway, as a distraction; another way of adding wealth, and for getting a tighter grasp on power and to further exercise population control. The question is when will the viability of America debt be questioned? Will the failure to deliver US treasuries break the market and not nonparticipation? We do not know but it is surely possible. This is why we have not for some time recommended US Treasuries, but instead Swiss franc Treasuries for those who prefer a partial cash position. It is very simple. The more debt the US government creates and the more money and credit the Fed creates the more the value of the dollar depreciates. Worse yet, the collateral being presented for the exchange of Treasuries is essentially worthless. We also believe Treasuries are being created and not being reported in order to satisfy the perceived flight to quality. Remember, these people do not tell the truth about anything and they believe as the Illuminated ones that they can do anything they please. That is why we continue to tell you to be out of US government and debt paper as well as the stock market. The only exceptions are gold, silver and oil and gas stocks. Cash out your retirement plans if you can and move them into gold and silver related assets. We can promise you two things, hyperinflation and eventual Treasury default. Why do you think on 11/15 major nations are meeting to form a new monetary unit? It will take several months. But it is about to happen. The dollar as a reserve currency and as a store of value is finished and many other currencies will follow. Remember 64.5% of world central bank reserves are in US dollars. No country is going to survive this unscathed. There will be a trigger as there always is. It probably will be an economic event or a string of events that begins the dollar collapse. There are things going on we know nothing about, but which we will soon find out about.

We have another couple of bubbles coming. There is a pension bomb that is in process and the credit card bubble-bomb. Lenders wrote off about $21 billion in bad credit card loans in the first half of 2008, and they haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Companies are laying off millions of workers and it is currently conservatively estimated that by the end of 2009 they’ll lose another $55 billion. Currently losses are 5.5% of debt outstanding and probably will easily exceed 8%.

As lenders rethink their lending rules our credit-hooked nation is rethinking their credit habits. It is about time lenders smartened up and stopped being greedy and it is about time Americans started paying for gas, food and other items with cash. You should only be using credit cards for emergencies and you should pay off your debit every month.

In 2005 mortgage extractions were $595 billion, in 2007 they fell to $470 billion and the second quarter of 2008 saw $9.5 billion. At that rate we’ll see a 90% drop from 2005.

Total loans from commercial banks grew by $89 billion yoy to December. Of that $61 billion was credit card debt. That means banks only lent $28 billion to business or to individuals. These numbers show you how stressed consumers are, amid accelerating job loss, low wages and high inflation, home price deflation, the effects of illegal immigration and the losses in equity in stocks, never mind having their retirement accounts clobbered. Credit card debt is up – it has risen more in the recent 10 weeks than it has in the previous 10 months. The increase is annualized at 48.3%. American Express delinquencies on credit payments rose to 4.1% in the third quarter, up from 2.5% yoy, their pool of uncollectible loans to a high of 6.7%. If it weren’t so sad the following would be laughable. The second largest credit card merchant vendor is McDonalds. This is a sign of very serious distress. This level of credit card usage is unsustainable.

All this comes as stock market losses worldwide reduced global wealth by $16 trillion. A good part of which was in retirement accounts. This coming year government will admit to unemployment of more than 9%. That puts U6 at 14% and long-term at 17% using government figures. The duration of current unemployment is nine months or 38 weeks. That will be at least 14 months at the end of 2009. Unless unemployment benefits are expended an additional six months they’ll be lots of people in serious financial trouble. That means less consumption, which will feed recession. Incidentally, that will widen the budget deficit. Unemployed don’t pay taxes and that means less revenue.

We see a 2009 budget deficit of $1.2 trillion plus, as the recession deepens. The only thing keeping the end of 2009 out of depression will be massive injections of money and credit and that will cause the dollar to fall and inflation, gold and silver to rise. With all this in the mix we see would-be newsletter writers, economists and analysts predicting already slow recovery by the end of 2009. In order to be politically acceptable they didn’t recognize recession until a few months ago, a year and one-half behind the curve. This in spite of massive welfare during the year.

OBAMA’S BIRTH WRAP-UP

Source: WhatReallyHappened.com.

The internet is still being spammed with emails trying to claim that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen and therefore everyone should vote for John McCain. So, here is all the information that has been researched about Obama’s birth here in Hawaii all in one chunk, so that when you get one of these “Swift Boat” emails, you can hit reply-all and send this.

First off, the claim that Barack Obama has not released his birth certificate is false. He released it months ago.

Click for larger image

The hoaxers have claimed that this certificate is a fake, but have yet to produce any evidence to back that claim up. Their approach, straight out of the Napoleonic code, is to make continual accusations and demand that the accused prove their innocence. They hope that simply by repeating a claim often enough, useful idiots will come to believe it. But here in the United States, we follow the principle that the ACCUSER must prove the accused guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. What that means is that when the Swift-Boaters accuse Barack Obama of fraud, it is they who are required to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Otherwise, we as citizens are obligated to ignore such baseless accusations, and certainly refuse to forward them along to everyone in our mailing lists (as these spammed emails always insist we must do).

There is more evidence that backs up the Birth Certificate. Hawaii has two major newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star Bulletin. BOTH newspapers include birth announcements, and pages found in the archives of BOTH newspapers record the August 4th, 1961 birth of Barack Obama.

The Honolulu Advertiser	The Star Bulletin

Now, McCain’s (Rove’s) useful idiots will scream that these are also fakes; that they are part of this grand conspiracy by Obama’s parents to smuggle a newborn baby from Kenya into Honolulu to obtain a birth certificate and birth announcements. But what is lacking in their story is MOTIVE. It’s not like Obama’s parents knew back then that Barack would go into politics, and needed to be “Natural Born.” Why bother with such a deception, which includes a very risky flight half way around the world with a newborn baby.

Finally, the Swift-Boaters hoisted with their own petard with a story carried by World Net Daily, that included the claim “WND has learned that Hawaii’s Gov. Linda Lingle has placed the candidate’s birth certificate under seal and instructed the state’s Department of Health to make sure no one in the press obtains access to the original document under any circumstances.”

This prompted the following statement from the office of Governor Lingle.

Aloha, Thank you for emailing Governor Linda Lingle’s office. A recent article in WorldNetDaily.com (October 26, 2008) claiming that Hawai‘i Governor Linda Lingle sealed Sen. Barack Obama’s birth certificate is false. Under Hawai‘i’s state law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18), copies of vital records may only be released to those who have a tangible relationship to the person whose record is being sought. Neither the Governor’s office, nor any other office in the State of Hawai’i, can provide information concerning birth certificates, or produce birth certificates, to anyone except those who are listed in the law governing vital statistics records. Vital statistics records, such as birth certificates, are protected by strict confidentiality requirements. Specifically, pursuant to section 338-18, Hawai‘i Revised Statutes (HRS), the Department of Health, which maintains these records, may not allow the inspection of a birth certificate, or issue a certified copy of a birth certificate, or disclose any information contained in a birth certificate, unless it is satisfied that the applicant has a direct and tangible interest in the record: (a) To protect the integrity of vital statistics records, to ensure their proper use, and to ensure the efficient and proper administration of the vital statistics system, it shall be unlawful for any person to permit inspection of, or to disclose information contained in vital statistics records, or to copy or issue a copy of all or part of any such record, except as authorized by this part or by rules adopted by the department of health. (b) The department shall not permit inspection of public health statistics records, or issue a certified copy of any such record or part thereof, unless it is satisfied that the applicant has a direct and tangible interest in the record. The following persons shall be considered to have a direct and tangible interest in a public health statistics record: (1) The registrant; (2) The spouse of the registrant; (3) A parent of the registrant; (4) A descendant of the registrant; (5) A person having a common ancestor with the registrant; (6) A legal guardian of the registrant; (7) A person or agency acting on behalf of the registrant; (8) A personal representative of the registrant’s estate; (9) A person whose right to inspect or obtain a certified copy of the record is established by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction; (10) Adoptive parents who have filed a petition for adoption and who need to determine the death of one or more of the prospective adopted child’s natural or legal parents; (11) A person who needs to determine the marital status of a former spouse in order to determine the payment of alimony; (12) A person who needs to determine the death of a nonrelated co-owner of property purchased under a joint tenancy agreement; and (13) A person who needs a death certificate for the determination of payments under a credit insurance policy. You can find the complete statute at http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol06_Ch0321-0344/HRS0338/HRS_0338-0018.htm Mahalo, Office of Governor Lingle

Governor Lingle’s office then followed up with …

“The state registrar of the Department of Health’s vital statistics record office can verify Sen. Barack Obama’s birth certificate.”

It should be pointed out that contrary to the claims made in some of the spammed emails, Governor Linda Lingle is a REPUBLICAN, not a Democrat. It is difficult to imagine Lingle protecting Obama to the detriment of her own party’s candidate.

There is, in short, no evidence to support these allegations, and ample evidence to cast doubt on their veracity.

At the end, this is just plain old fashioned harassment by McCain’s people. It is guilt by proclamation. It is smear. It is mud. It is a sign of desperation by that segment of the population which grew rich under the Bush tax cuts and will do anything to keep from losing their special exalted status.

Worse, this is an effort to distract the voters away form the real issues of this election, which remain th eeoncomy and the pointless wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The election is less than a week away. Stay focused. Stay on target. The economy is nearly dead from 8 years of GOP leadership and pointless wars. Don’t get suckered into another 4 years of the same by a little mud-slinging.

Bounce Monday! Elections Must Be Near

From George Ure’s Urban Survival site. Check daily Monday through Saturday for updates. I think he needs to fix that chart in the middle of the page.

http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm

Maybe sitting here in the outback of East Texas, I’ve become a little jaded when it comes to reading news headlines. When the first thing that slaps the eyeballs is “Rush is on to get ‘rescue plan’ moving: Administration seeks to calm markets with quick action on bailout plan” I start to feel like the inhabitant of a UFO: is this planet for real?

Having spent too much time in the strategic planning region of corporate America, my first inclination after another slug of coffee is to look at metrics. Remember, a couple of weeks back I explained how “memeering” was going on around all this economic panic and the main thrust of ’spin control’ would be the carefully worded newsroom memos about ‘word us’. Part and parcel of that, we watched as the term ‘rescue plan’ went from being less than 20% compared to ‘bailout’ to about 35% last time I looked.

My expectation was that ‘bailout’ would continue to wane while ‘rescue’ would continue ascension because American’s love to ‘rescue’ everything from lost cats and dogs to Hillary Clinton. (We’ll have no snide remarks there, Citizen…)

As of o-dark-thirty, the Google news search engine threw back 334,382 returns on ‘bailout’ while ‘rescue plan’ was at 180,379. That’s a total of 514,751, so the ‘rescue plan’ is holding at 35%.

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As we start the week off, with a Bank Holiday for non-financial reasons (it’s Columbus Day), there are a half dozen, or so, reasons why the futures are up in the pre-open activity.

To begin with, there was much hoopla about the G-7 and friends who gathered this weekend to coordinate the further print of money and ways to inject it into the global financial system in something approaching a synchronized manner. “IMF and G-7 Say: No More Lehmans” says a BusinessWeek headline. Don’t tell them the last remaining US investment banks have already fled the scene, taking up the cloak of regular bankers. Sheesh!

And the ‘regular bankers’ who didn’t cause the crisis can hardly wait till tomorrow morning when “Hank’s Your Buddy” Paulson’s minions will start buying stock of banks. Gosh, do you think financial stocks might rally as the government steps in as the next ‘greater fools’ in owning paper assets?

This crooked banker scam has been such a rousing success in the US that bankers in Europe have taken their cue as “European leaders agree on taxpayer buyout plan.” Stories are swirling about layoffs in the banking sector as a result.

Did you notice this little gem of spin? When the US Fed sloshes money into Bank Bailouts, it’s called a ‘government investment’. When the UK does it, it’s ‘nationalizing banks’?

The stories that are not making headlines yet are those of regular businesses which have their backs up against the wall because the suddenly-conservative in the banking world won’t lend money to their traditional best customers. As a result, companies are getting behind on rents and payrolls – things that tend to cascade outward.

The Detroit Free Press headlines that America’s “Middle class finds itself buried in debt; simple misfortunes make bills pile up quickly”

This administration continues to solve the wrong problem: Mortgage relief and debt relief is scant and distant compared with what’s been done for the Banking Class. The public outage continues to build at the arrogance of Washington ignoring the clear Will of the People.

It’s not like I’m alone sensing it. Go read Ben Stein’s (Money) story in the NY Times this weekend: “Fear and Loathing in La Jolla.” Stein’s piece is very well-written and in touch with what we call around here “Street Level Economics”. So much so that he actually uses the “R” word at the tail end of the piece:

“Frankly, I don’t know the answer. I just know that for a long time, we have paid Wall Street “experts” unimaginable sums for preparing for our retirement. They still have our money, and we have ashes. And I wonder whose side government is on, which is a bad thought to have, and I wish I didn’t have it. As the song goes, there is revolution in the air.”

“R” word, got it? That’s the one word linguistically that’ll be simmering for the next six months before boiling over into the Summer of Hell in 2009. Just notice as it percolates around gathering use and context in your life for the next six months.

But the MainStreamMedia’s message this particular Monday is that “Everything is good. Remain calm. Wall Street will now Rally.” About the only thing that’s missing is some fool off on the sidelines yelling “Good times are just ahead” – the mantra of the early days of the previous Depression.

As I shared with Peoplenomics.com subscribers this weekend, the timing of a bounce should be absolutely evident in this chart:

If the Replay of 1929 continues, we should rally back to about 10,200 if I’m eyeing it right. Rally into the election? So that’s where the $1.5-trillion went, huh?

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The government buying up stock on the open market this week is not the only evidence that elections must be near in the Checkbook Republic.

Nossir: The Tax, War, and Oil Party has arranged for the price of gasoline to come down. In a weekly report out Sunday, the price of regular is closing in on $3 a gallon. This is evidence of what?

Ure’s Economic Axiom 437: The price of gasoline is proportional to the number of days till the next election of folks who can influence energy policy.

In the Big Picture, we notice that OPEC is calling a meeting to discuss cutting their oil production quotas in order to hold prices high, but gosh, how coincidental; the meeting won’t be till November 18th in Vienna. With an election over by then, they should be free to bump prices (via quotas) to whatever they feel like.

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The Washington Post’s Electoral Vote Map shows Barack Obama with a decent lead over John McPalin. But there’s still three weeks to go.

Too bad the “Campaigns Turn Nasty”. But nasty’s a great substitution for content and substantive, thoughtful discussions for a majority of the flock (of sheep).

I’m betting the Oil Party will get gas down to $2.75 a gallon before polling, gambling that your memory will be poor enough you’ll overlook which party has out-socialized, self-employment taxed, and warred us into financial ruin. Niice of you to bail out insurance companies and banks for ‘em, though…

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Despite the belief of their followers that either presidential wannabe will make a difference, I don’t see it. I’m planning to vote third party all the way this year. Not that it will change anything, but at least it may register somewhere that at least one voter in Texas ain’t buying the same old crap again this time.

The Friedrich Hayek cartoon series “The Road to Serfdom” seems apropos.

The Meatball (or dead cat) Bounce

European, Asian markets bounce back. Gosh, look surprised. Doesn’t change our long-term outlook, so revel in it while you can.

Economy May Be Screwed But…

“Prostitution has not suffered drop-off despite economic meltdown.” reports the NY Daily News.

<snip>

Palin Family Values Cartoon

Edited 9/11/08:

I’m sorry I didn’t include a link to the original source of this cartoon, The Cagel Post.

The 2008 Republican Party: Abortion, Abortion, Abortion. Some Things Will Never Change

Source: The Ostroy Report.

It’s 2008. The country is mired in a deadly, costly war in Iraq. We are engaged in another critical war in Afghanistan, where the Bush administration, distracted by Iraq, has taken its eye off of a resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda. We live in an age of terrorist threats. Our economy is in recession, or at best, on the verge. Oil and gas prices are at record levels. We’re saddled with record debt. Inflation is increasing. Consumer confidence declining. Unemployment up, real wages down. A tanking stock market. Our educational and health care systems trail the rest of the Western world. But what’s become the central theme in the Republican’s insatiable hunger for the White House? Abortion. That’s the issue they think will most energize and rally their base as well as independents. That abortion is enough to divert voters’ attention away from the miserable failure of the GOP’s last eight years in power, and the fact that it’s nominee, Sen. John McCain, offers nothing more than another four of the same.

McCain’s appointment of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate is a cheap attempt to play this incendiary card. She’s hard-core anti-abortion. The GOP’s banking on her evangelical street-cred to outweigh the fact that she has virtually no experience whatsoever to be placed in such a critical position in national politics. It’s the same old Republican bait-and-switch game. When the shit starts to hit the fan, they toss out the social hot-button cards–religion, gay marriage, abortion–to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the electorate. It’s dumb-down-America time. Once again, they’re trying to get Mr. and Mrs. Middle America to say, “Sure the Republicans and George Bush have let me down…sure, the party isn’t offering anything different this time around. I don’t have enough money to pay my bills, fill my car with gas and take care of my kids…I can’t save any money…my wife lost her job…my groceries keep going up…I don’t have adequate health coverage…but hey, I’m voting for McCain and Palin because they’ll fight to prevent some sleazy New York liberal women from getting abortions.” But will Americans, even Republicans, vote against their own economic interests yet again as they did in 2000 and 2004?

But to the religious right, the stakes are even higher. The GOP’s message is not just about abortion per se. The Rovian promise to its myopic base is that the McCain/Palin ticket will stack the Supreme Court with Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Indeed, with two vacancies likely to arise within the next president’s term, this issue is a major one, and the Repubs are pulling out all the stops. When it comes to God, faith and family values, many Republicans have a funny way of ignoring everything else, even at their own expense. And McCain and Palin know this. And they’re milking it for everything they’ve got because they have little else to run on. It certainly isn’t McCain’s command of economics, nor is it Palin’s national security experience. And when it comes to “family values,” McCain’s infidelity, Palin’s teenage daughter’s unwed pregnancy, her abuse-of-power investigation, or her husband’s DWI certainly doesn’t paint a Rockwellian picture.

In fact, McCain’s national security “expertise” is highly overrated. He unconditionally supported the Iraq invasion, helped Bush take his eye of Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and continues to be a reckless war-monger. That he was “right” about the surge should impress no one. Did anyone honestly believe sending in 20,000 additional toops would not have a positive impact in decreasing the violence in a very specific area like Anbar Province? His support for the surge was and remains irrational, as it, like the war itself, has failed to create a sustainable, self-governing American-style Democracy in Iraq, which was the goal (something McCain and the Repubs like to forget). Shift to abortion, abortion, abortion. Divert and distract. It’s the classic Rovian playbook.

This time around, in 2008, voters should reject the abortion issue just as they should gay marriage, gun control and anything else that simply doesn’t matter. Our nation’s in the shitter, for Fuck’s sake. They should go to the polls to protest their colossal outrage that Bush’s elective vanity war in Iraq has made us and the world less safe from our real enemy, al Qaeda, and that our anemic economy is killing them. But will they….

Democrats in Denver Should Read the American Monetary Act

By: Richard C. Cook, Market Oracle.

How are things going at the Democratic Party National Convention in Denver this week?

Are they talking about the fact that the Western world is run by an international financial elite headquartered in London, the financial capitals of mainland Europe (such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, and Milan), and, of course, New York City?

Are they mentioning at their cocktail parties that the financial elite exert control over the world’s population through the cartels that make up the world’s producing economies and through the civilian and military bureaucracies who work for the governments that kow-tow to them?

Of course they know that the most important cartels are those which control energy resources. And that of these, the commodity of central importance is oil. But is any of this helping them draw conclusions regarding the doubling of oil prices during the last year or about the largest oil company profits in history?

Also, they should be drawing the right conclusions from the fact that every private and pubic enterprise operates on the basis of a money economy, though it would be more accurate to call it a credit economy. This means that whoever controls the issuance of money and credit controls the world. And the world’s monetary systems function on the basis of money and credit being introduced into circulation through loans from the banking system, loans for which interest is charged. So what should that tell them?

In fact, they should be pointing out to each other and their TV viewers that the charging of interest for the use of money is a chain around the neck of everyone on earth. Further, that these cumulative interest charges are built into the price of every product that is manufactured or consumed. And that growth of debt means price increases too.

They should be honest in making it clear that the world is a master-slave society, that the slaves are those who borrow and pay interest, that the masters are those who collect the interest, and that this unjust system has existed in one form or another for thousands of years.

The candidates and delegates are talking about the aspirations of the American people and how everyone should have an opportunity to achieve their dreams. But if the United States were a free nation, they would also be talking about a financial system that destroys people’s dreams.

Unfortunately, the highest rung the candidates and delegates have been able to reach on the ladder of modern-day slavery is the need for more jobs—but they fail to note that jobs are not only the means by which people live, but also the instruments for them to pay the heavy burden of interest the masters of finance require.

What they won’t say is that the world economy is based on usury, something religions used to consider a crime (and which Islam still does). Usury is the charging of interest for the use of money. As the religions backed off from their prohibitions of interest, usury became just excess interest. But that’s not what the word really means.

So what have over two centuries of usury done to the United States?

The best answer ever given to that question was contained in a paper entitled “Revisiting U.S. Public and Private Debt” published in January 2005 by Dr. Bob Blain, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University. The paper updated an earlier study by Dr. Blain published for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the International Social Science Journal, November, 1987, Paris, pages 577-591.

In his paper, Dr. Blain examined the growth of total public and private debt in the U.S. Total debt includes “the debts of governments (federal, state, and local), corporations, farmers, home mortgages, and consumer, commercial, and financial debts.”

In his analysis, Dr. Blain began with data from the Bureau of Economic Analyses of the United States Department of Commerce which covered the years 1916-1976. After that year the Bureau stopped publishing the data.

The figures showed that from 1916-1976, total U.S. debt grew from $82 billion to $3,800 billion ($3.8 trillion). But most of that growth was during the last 21 years, from 1955-1976, when it began to grow exponentially. Dr. Blain wrote, “The consistency of the pattern suggests that some imperative is at work, something that requires debt to increase.”

Dr. Blain found the answer by researching American history. He wrote: “Then I read G.R. Taylor’s 1950 book, Hamilton and the National Debt, which described the debate over Alexander Hamilton’s plan to fund the new economy with borrowed money.” He continued:

“The most revealing account was a speech by the first congressman from Georgia, James Jackson, on February 9, 1790, in which he predicted that adoption of Hamilton’s funding plan would lead to the explosive growth of debt. Jackson said, ‘Though our present debt be but a few millions, in the course of a single century it may be multiplied to an extent we dare not think of.’” (Annals of Congress, Vol. I, February 1790, pp. 1141-2)

From the very beginning, the U.S. had a monetary system based on borrowing and debt. First came the thousands of state chartered banks that began operating late in the Revolutionary War period and continued in one form or another until today. Then there were the two early central banks: the First Bank of the United States (1791-1811) and the Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836). Today’s national banking system began during the Civil War with the National Banking Acts of 1863-64. Then there is the system we are living under today, the Federal Reserve, chartered by Congress in 1913. Even during the times when the government has sold its debt directly to the public, as with war bonds, savings bonds, and Treasury notes and bills, that too has been money borrowed at interest.

Although there have been times in history when money entered into circulation other than through debt, such as with coinage and the Civil War greenbacks, those were exceptions and today are of little importance.

Dr. Blain estimated that from the time Alexander Hamilton placed the U.S. under a debt-based monetary system until today, the debt has compounded at 5.8 percent annually. The big problem with this system, he said, was “that no money was created to pay interest.” He continued:

“Loans created only the principal. Interest had to be paid out of principal. So payment of interest reduced the money supply and slowed economic activity. Recovery could come only when new loans were taken out at least equal to interest paid.”

Dr. Blain concluded, “As long as the money supply of a nation is created as debt costing interest, debt must grow by compound interest.” From a longer-range view, it’s a system that is constantly collapsing and that must constantly be bailed out.

Dr. Blain next sought to update his figures past the 1976 data from the Bureau of Economic Analyses. Turning to the Federal Reserve’s series on “Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding,” he found remarkably similar indicators.

He found that adding data from the Federal Reserve from 1945 to 2003 showed the “debt explosion” continuing. In 1945 total debt was $463.4 billion. In 2003 it was $44,967.7 billion ($45.0 trillion). When he projected the debt level for 2010, he arrived at a figure of $74.9 trillion. By this time the debt curve was climbing so steeply there would be almost a doubling of the amount of total debt in only nine years.

It might be argued that these figures do not take into account inflation. This is because lending at interest is the cause of inflation. The dollars still have to be repaid with interest. The problem occurs when economic growth, measured by GDP, does not keep up.

Looking at the growth of GDP from 1945 to 2003, the increase was from $223.1 billion to $10,987.9 billion, a factor of 49. But the debt ($463.4 billion vs. $44,967.7 billion) grew by a factor of 97, almost twice the rate of GDP growth. Thus the total debt burden on the economy has doubled from a ratio of 2:1 to more than 4:1 (though it was much less than that during the early days of the nation).

But with continued compound growth of debt and a slow- or no-growth state of the economy as we head into a recession, we are starting to see what Dr. Blain called an “acceleration to meltdown.” He wrote:

“We are buying more and more in the same amount of time. Witness the efforts of people to get rid of their excess through yard sales, storage units, and big trash pickup days, and the massive size of what are euphemistically called landfills. While two billion people in the world lack basics such as clean water, food, and shelter, Americans throw away their microwave ovens, televisions, computers, refrigerators, furniture, and cars. Meanwhile, acceleration is applauded as increasing productivity. It’s like arguing that cancer is good because it grows.”

These are the things the Democrats in Denver should be talking about, instead of going to so many parties. They should be making note that the U.S., to quote economists close to the Federal Reserve, is “functionally bankrupt.”

In fact, the debt this nation owes to the banks, to foreign creditors, and to each other can never be paid off. Further, one big reason for all of our fruitless military endeavors overseas may simply be to escape unpleasant economic realities at home. But this is pointless. Nothing creates more debt than war, as the bankers have always known.

The only solution is to adopt a monetary system that is not based on debt. Dr. Blain makes a couple of specific recommendations: 1) “Stop using percentage rates to calculate charges for the use of money”; and 2) “Congress must supply the economy with a money base that is debt-free and interest-free.”

The second point is a call for a new monetary system, not one based solely on lending by the banks or on government borrowing. One organization that has developed a blueprint for such a system is the American Monetary Institute (AMI), headquartered in Chicago. The director of the AMI is Stephen Zarlenga, author of a massive, groundbreaking work: The Lost Science of Money (AMI, 2002). Zarlenga’s assistant is Jamie Walton, a monetary reformer from New Zealand.

AMI will be holding its fourth annual conference in Chicago on September 25-28. Expected as keynote speaker is Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whose wife Elizabeth once worked as an intern at AMI. Dr. Bob Blain will be a featured speaker.

On the AMI website at www.monetary.org is a remarkable document, the American Monetary Act. The product of several years of work by Zarlenga and his network, which now includes a number of local chapters around the country, the American Monetary Act would replace today’s debt-based monetary system with one where the government spends or loans money directly into circulation.

Under the Act, the Federal Reserve would be retained as a national financial clearinghouse but would no longer be a bank of issue. The system would be overseen by a Monetary Control Board within the U.S. Treasury Department. The Act also includes a provision for a citizens’ dividend, similar in some respects to the Alaska Permanent Fund, which would inject desperately needed purchasing power into the economy without additional government debt or taxation.

Also promoting a citizens’ dividend, by the way, is Stephen Shafarman in his important new book, Peaceful, Positive Revolution. (Tendril Press, 2008)

It’s the American Monetary Act the candidates and delegates in Denver should skip one of their parties to read, because it’s the only way any of their hopes for America can ever be realized. Says AMI’s Jamie Walton:

“This is a crucial time. Things are happening. We have got some key media people talking and writing about our kind of reforms. The inertia is starting to yield. Things are starting to roll. The worsening conditions in 2009 will give us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be heard above the propaganda.”

By Richard C. Cook
http:// www.richardccook.com

Humor: The McCain Card

From Dump Mccain.com

Mock him all you’d like…but that POW Card got him an amazing upgrade in the wife department: Younger, healthier & Dirty-Filthy-Sexy Rich with unlimited access to beer and pills.

His old pick up line: “Hey baby, I know some stress positions that will blow your mind”…worked like a charm. As a matter of fact, the DRILL HERE/DRILL NOW slogan was born that night. So, who’s laughing now?…Suckerz.

Just a few games of Naughty Prisoner/Dominatrix Prison Guard later…

Eight Mansions- $100 million dollars
Swanky non-elitist shoes- $500.00
Sympathy date/adultery – Priceless

Don’t hate the player, hate the game…
Better yet, get your own POW Card at any participating McCain Election Center in the Greater Baghdad area.

(No need to ACT NOW!: Supplies are unlimited and this offer may expire in 100 years. Ability to crash 4 multi-million dollar military aircraft due to pilot error will be verified. Valid record of moral leadership and/or decency not required.)

THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS CAN’T TAKE MUCH MORE PUNISHMENT

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com via Alternet.

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.
— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

The Republican and Democratic conventions are just around the corner, which means that we’re at a critical time in our nation’s history. For this is the moment when the country’s political and media consensus finally settles on the line of bullshit it will be selling to the public as the “national debate” come fall.

If you pay close attention you can actually see the trial balloons whooshing overhead. There have been numerous articles of late of the Whither the Debate? genus in the country’s major dailes and news mags, pieces like Patrick Healy’s “Target: Barack Obama. Strategy: What Day is it?” in the New York Times. They ostensibly wonder aloud about what respective “plans of attack” Barack Obama and John McCain will choose to pursue against one another in the fall.

In these pieces we already see the candidates trying on, like shoes, the various storylines we might soon have hammered into our heads like wartime slogans. Most hilarious from my viewpoint is the increasingly real possibility that the Republicans will eventually decide that their best shot against Obama is to pull out the old “He’s a flip-flopper” strategy — which would be pathetic, given that this was the same tired tactic they used against John Kerry four years ago, were it not for the damning fact that it might actually work again. (I’m actually not sure sometimes what is more repulsive: the bosh they trot out as campaign “issues,” or the enthusiasm with which the public buys it.)

Naturally we’ll also see the “Patriotism Gap” storyline whipped out and reused over and over again. There will also be much talk emanating from the McCain camp about “experience,” although this line of attack will not be nearly as fruitful for him as it was for Hillary Clinton, mainly because the word “experience” in McCain’s case also has a habit of reminding voters that the Arizona senator is, well, wicked old.

The Obama camp, playing with a big halftime lead as the cliché goes, is going to play this one close to the vest, sticking to a strategy of using larger and larger fonts every week for their “CHANGE” placards, and getting the candidates’ various aides and spokesgoons to use the term “McCain-Bush policies” as many times as possible on political talk shows. Obama will also use this pre-convention period to do what every general election candidate does after a tough primary-season fight, i.e. ditch all the positions he took en route to securing the nomination and replace them with opinions subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) reconfigured to fit the latest polling information coming out of certain key swing states. Both sides as well as the pundit class will describe this early positioning for combat over swing-state electoral votes as a “race for the center” (AP, July 3: “Candidates Courting the Center”), as if the “political center” in America were a place where huge chunks of the population tirelessly obsessed over semi-relevant media-driven wedge issues like stem-cell research and gay marriage, even as they lacked money to buy food and make rent every month.

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the “wooden” and – condescending – Al Gore versus the “dummy” Bush, and 2004 featured that same ‘regular guy’ Bush against the “patrician” and “bookish” John Kerry (who also “looked French”), in 2008 we’re going to be sold the “maverick” McCain against the “smooth” Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines. Time has even experimented with a “poker versus craps” storyline, feeding off the incidental fact that Obama is a regular poker player while McCain reportedly favors craps, which apparently has some electorally relevant meaning — and if you know what that something is, please let me know.

We’re also going to be fed truckloads of onerous horseshit about the candidate wives. The Michelle Obama content is going to go something like this: the Fox/Limbaugh crowd will first plaster her with Buckwheatesque caricatures (the National Review cover was hilariously over-the-top in that respect) and racially loaded epithets like “baby Mama” (that via Fox News spokeswhore Michelle Malkin, God bless her) and “angry black woman” (via self-aggrandizing, cop-mustached Chicago-based prune Cal Thomas). Next, the so-called “mainstream” press, the “respectable” press, which of course is above such behavior, will amplify those attacks 10 million-fold via endless waves of secondary features soberly pondering the question of whether or not Michelle Obama is a “political liability” — because of stuff like the Thomas column, and Malkin’s quip and the endless rumors about a mysterious “whitey” video. Cindy McCain, meanwhile, will generally be described as a political asset, as the pundit class tends to applaud mute, stoned-looking candidate wives who have soldiered on bravely while being martyred by rumors of their mostly absent husband’s infidelities. It will help on the martyrdom front that McCain launched his political career with her family money and drove her into an actual, confirmable chemical dependency. As long as she keeps gamely wobbling onstage and trying to smile into the camera, she’s going to get straight As from the political press, guaranteed.

Some combination of all of these things is going to comprise the so-called “national debate” this fall. Now, we live in an age where our media deceptions are so far-reaching and comprehensive that they almost smother reality, at times seeming actually to replace reality — but even in the context of the inane TV-driven fantasyland we’ve grown used to inhabiting, this year’s crude cobbling together of a phony “national conversation” by our political press is an outrageous, monstrously offensive deception. For if, as now seems likely, this fall’s election is ultimately turned into a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate Michelle Obama’s face longer than John McCain’s diapers, it will be at the expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV network or live in Washington, you probably already know what that emergency is.

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents’ economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to “tell me what was going on in their lives economically.” He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I’ll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don’t have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.

This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried to sell her house to pay for her son’s schooling:

I don’t go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating “cereal and toast” for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.

“The middle class is disappearing,” says Sanders. “In real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country.”

Here’s the thing: nobody needs me or Bernie Sanders to tell them that it sucks out there and that times are tougher economically in this country than perhaps they’ve been for quite a long time. We’ve all seen the stats — median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. If you’re reading this and you had to drive to work today or pay a credit card bill in the last few weeks you know better than I do for sure how fucked up things have gotten. I hear talk from people out on the campaign trail about mortgages and bankruptcies and bill collectors that are enough to make your ass clench with 100 percent pure panic.

None of this is a secret. Here, however, is something that is a secret: that this is a class issue that is being intentionally downplayed by a political/media consensus bent on selling the public a version of reality where class resentments, or class distinctions even, do not exist. Our “national debate” is always a thing where we do not talk about things like haves and have-nots, rich and poor, employers versus employees. But we increasingly live in a society where all the political action is happening on one side of the line separating all those groups, to the detriment of the people on the other side.

We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices — the hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on foreign oil, “foreign” representing those nations, Arab and Chinese, that lend us the money to pay for our wars.

And while we’ve all heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our military spending, this is always portrayed as either “corruption” or simple inefficiency, and not what it really is — a profound expression of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary, struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.

You want an example? Sanders has a great one for you. The Senator claims that he has been trying for years to increase funding for the Federally Qualified Health Care (FQHC) program, which finances community health centers across the country that give primary health care access to about 16 million Americans a year. He’s seeking an additional $798 million for the program this year, which would bring the total appropriation to $2.9 billion, or about what we spend every two days in Iraq.

“But for five billion a year,” Sanders insists, “we could provide basic primary health care for every American. That’s how much it would cost, five billion.”

As it is, though, Sanders has struggled to get any additional funding. He managed to get $250 million added to the program in last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services bill, but Bush vetoed the legislation, “and we ended up getting a lot less.”

Okay, now, hold that thought. While we’re unable to find $5 billion for this simple program, and Sanders had to fight and claw to get even $250 million that was eventually slashed, here’s something else that’s going on. According to a recent report by the GAO, the Department of Defense has already “marked for disposal” hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts — and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order! In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force — some $235 million worth, or about the same amount Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health care program last year — are already marked for disposal! Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away!

“They’re planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn’t even come in yet,” says Sanders.

According to the report, we’re spending over $30 million a year, and employing over 1,400 people, just to warehouse all the defense equipment we don’t need. For instance — we already have thousands of unneeded aircraft blades, but 7,460 on the way, at a cost of $2 million, which will join those already earmarked for the waste pile.

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he’s going to “look at entitlement program” waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the “death tax.” We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis… well, shit, what can I say? That’s what’s happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting “entitlement” programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we’re not going to have that conversation, because we’re going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama’s voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few politicians out there smart enough and secure enough to understand that the future of American politics is necessarily going to involve some pretty frank and contentious confrontations. The phony blue-red divide, which has been buoyed for years by some largely incidental geographical disagreements over religion and other social issues, is going to give way eventually to a real debate grounded in a brutal economic reality increasingly common to all states, red and blue.

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

The Republicans wanted to take Social Security, the signature policy underpinning of the middle class, and put it into private accounts — which is a fancy way of saying that they wanted to take a huge bundle of American taxpayer cash and invest it in the very companies, the IBMs and Boeings and GMs and so on, that are exporting our jobs abroad. They want the American middle class to finance its very own impoverishment! The Democrats say no, let’s keep Social Security more or less as is, and let that impoverishment happen organically.

Now we have a new set of dire problems in the areas of home ownership and exploding energy prices. In both of these matters the basic dynamic is transnational companies raiding the cash savings of the middle class. Because those same companies finance the campaigns of our politicians, we won’t hear much talk about getting private industry to help foot the bill to pay for these crises, or forcing the energy companies to cut into their obscene profits for the public good. We will, however, hear talk about taxpayer-subsidized bailouts and various irrelevancies like McCain’s gas tax holiday (an amusing solution — eliminate taxes collected by government in order to pay for taxes collected by energy companies). Ultimately, however, you can bet that when the middle class finally falls all the way down, and this recession becomes something even worse, necessity will force our civil government — if anything remains of it by then — to press for the only real solution.

“Corporate America is going to have to reinvest in our society,” says Sanders. “It’s that simple.”

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

McCain-As-War-Hero Myth

Source: Ted Rall, Information Clearing House.

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War

Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we’re being asked to swallow in 2008.

Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. “A Vietnam hero and national security pro,” The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.

John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.

Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.

Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses – fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war – the Tonkin Gulf “incident” – never happened. The Vietnam War’s ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian “dominos” fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army – the evil communists – who stopped it.

Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former NATO commander out to dry: “Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

Even in an article criticizing the media for repeatedly framing McCain as a war hero, the liberal website Media Matters concedes: “McCain is, after all, a war hero; everybody agrees about that.”

Not everyone.

I was 12 when the last U.S. occupation troops fled Saigon. I remember how I – and most Americans – felt at the time.

We were relieved.

By the end of Nixon’s first term most people had turned against the war. Gallup polls taken in 1971 found that about 70 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Some believed it was immoral; others considered it unwinnable.

Since then, the political center has shifted right. We’ve seen the Reagan Revolution, Clinton’s Democratic centrism, and Bush’s post-9/11 flirtation with neo-McCarthyite fascism. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans – including Republicans – still think we should never have fought the Vietnam War.

“After the war’s 1975 conclusion,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The American Prospect in 2004, “Gallup has asked the question (“Did the U.S. make a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”) five times, in 1985, 1990, 1993, 1995, and 2000. All five times…respondents were consistent in calling the war a mistake by a margin of more than 2 to 1: by 74 percent to 22 percent in 1990, for example, and by 69 percent to 24 percent in 2000.”

Moreover, Tomasky continued, “vast majorities continue to call the war ‘unjust.’” Even in 2004, after 9/11, 62 percent considered the war unjust. Only 33 percent still thought it was morally justified.

Vietnam was an illegal, undeclared war of aggression. Can those who fought in that immoral war really be heroes? This question appeared settled after Reagan visited a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, including members of the SS, at Bitburg, West Germany in 1985. “Those young men,” claimed Reagan, “are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

Americans didn’t buy it. Reagan’s poll numbers, typically between 60 and 65 percent at the time, plunged to 41 percent after the visit. Those who fight for an evil cause receive no praise.

So why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors’ offer of early release. But that doesn’t make him a hero.

Hell, McCain isn’t even a victim.

At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on “gooks” (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males – true heroes, to a man – who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.

When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can’t help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?

Maybe he would have made it. I don’t know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.

Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge. Visit his website www.tedrall.com

VIDEO: Billboard displays burning World Trade Center with lame slogan, ‘Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat’

Conservatives are STILL using the 9/11 card?! What chutzpah. The attack happened on their watch, yet so far, no one has been fired or demoted.

The dumocrats could counter with a picture of our economy going down the toilet, but since they sat around with their thumbs up their asses and let the neocons run a muck the last eight years, it would be a tad hypocritical.

Source: David Edwards and Muriel Kane, Raw Story.

A political billboard in St. Cloud, Florida reads “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat” over an image of the burning World Trade Center.

Businessman Mike Meehan, who paid for the ad, says he’s “only trying to help Republicans.” The billboard also carries a link for Meehan’s website, TheRepublicanSong.com, at which he says, “I claim to be a man of God” and promotes his political song and video.

Meehan’s song, which appears to have racist overtones, begins, “The Democrat secular progressive move, political correctness is killing us too. They want to take the money from the hard working man, and give it to the lazy folks that don’t give a damn.”

Even Republicans have found the billboard “inappropriate,” and many residents want it to come down. “I’m thinking about the Twin Towers, all the families that were killed there,” one woman told local TV affliate WFTV.

Another local was more accepting, saying, “They can have their opinion. It’s a free country, you want to pay for the ad.”

However, the posters at right-wing site Lucianne.com were enthusiastic about the billboard. “Why isn’t Mike Meehan the Republican presidential candidate?” asked one. “Liberals get abjectly hysterical whenever the truth about them is pointed out,” wrote another. “People who refer to the terrorist attack as a tragedy are morons,” added a third.

The company which owns the billboard says it’s a free speech issue and has no plans to take Meehan’s ad down before the election.

The full story can be read here.

This video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast July 15, 2008.