Commentary  &  Opinion 

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by Free Market Duck

(Note: To contact FM Duck, please send email to FreeMarketDuck@hotmail.com  To prevent spam, please insert the word Quack Off in your email's subject line.  Thanks.)

04-30-2012
Martial Law By Executive Order  More...

04-17-2012
President Obama, "Tax the Rich!"  More...

04-09-2012
Complexity is Bad for your Health  More...

03-26-2012
WinderCare Tramples Upon Women's Private Property Rights  More...

03-23-2012
Liberty and ObamaCare  More...

03-20-2012
ObamaCare's Flawed Economic Foundations  More...

03-12-2012
The Education Games  More...

03-05-2012
The Hunger Games  More...

02-24-2012
Feds Redefine Pizza as a Vegetable  More...

02-06-2012
2012: The Obama-Romney Presidential Debates  More...

12-28-2011
The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe  More...

12-13-2011
Forget Britain's David Cameron Veto, Another Eurozone Crisis is Only Weeks Away  More...

12-11-2011
How Does Europe Borrow Dollars from the Fed?  More...

12-08-2011
Fix Was In:  The Stock Market Was Rigged  More...

11-15-2011
European Ponzi Goes Full Retard as EFSF Found to Monetize... Itself  More...

11-09-2011
Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid  More...

11-04-2011
Hell Explained by a Chemistry Student  More...

10-25-2011
Understanding Derivatives and The Bailout  More...

09-15-2011
The European Crisis  More...

07-24-2011
Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later  More...

05-20-2011
Obama Offers Israeli PM Pork Chops Laced with Cyanide  More...

04-19-2011
Budget cuts are meaningless without Federal Reserve transparency  More...

Old Nuclear News Revisited in the next 2 articles written three years ago at FM Duck and even more applicable today since Japan's recent nuclear catastrophe:

02-22-2008
Idaho Legies create Perfect Storm:  yellowcake plus Yellowstone plus Snake Plain Aquifer equals radioactive Super Volcanic blast  More...

03-25-2008
Gov Butch Otter signs corporate welfare Bill for $2 billion Uranium-235 enrichment plant to set Idaho up for Perfect Nuclear Storm:  a radioactive, volcanic firestorm on top of Snake Plain Aquifer's Lake Erie  More...

03-01-2011
A Union Education...or
What Wisconsin reveals about public workers and political power  More...

02-14-2011
Idaho Statesman claims "nullification" of Obamacare is "immoral"  More...

02-03-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 3 of 3  More...

02-02-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 2 of 3  More...

01-29-2011
What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 1 of 3  More...

01-15-2011
Toward Sensible Monetary Policy  More...

12-17-2010
What's wrong with our current Education System?  A Libertarian Discussion that asks, "What is Education?"  ... and better yet, what should Education Be?  More...

12-09-2010
WikiLeaks 1941  More...

12-05-2010
Billions Flushed Down Political Toilet in Afghanistan  More...

11-25-2010
How many different U.S. Governments are busy running America?  More...

11-24-2010
Financial Reckoning Day  More...

11-21-2010
Idaho on the Verge of Bankruptcy in 2012  More...

10-30-2010
New silver class action invokes RICO against JP Morgan, HSBC  More...

10-30-2010
Idaho Voters, Who Should You Vote For... and Which Amendments?  More...

10-27-2010
Federal Reserve Commits Treason as it Asks 18 Major Banks How Much Money They Want the Fed to Give Them to “Stimulate” the Economy:  $250 Billion, $500 Billion, $1 Trillion, $2 Trillion or More…  More...

10-19-2010
545 People  More...

10-10-2010
Central banks create $4.7 trillion mortgage foreclosure debacle with fractional reserve monetary concepts  More...

10-04-2010
Idaho Voters Asked to Vote Away Their Rights to Vote... Huh?  More...

10-01-2010
Obama's Three Economic Fallacies..., or
Why He Doesn't Get It  More...

09-25-2010
Socialist Double Speak: Why Aren't Boise's Sales Tax Exemptions Considered a Stimulus to the Economy?  More...

09-18-2010
Energy - Part 3 of 3
Why Are We Still Drilling for Oil When We have Tesla's Free Radiant Energy?  More...

08-31-2010
U.S. Government Mint to Sell Jr. Federal Printing Presses to U.S. Citizens…  More...

08-29-2010
Boise's Ada County Detox Center Bankrupt Within One Year as Cities Refuse to Cough Up the Dough to Pay for it…  More...

08-24-2010
America - a walking dead-zombie country…  More...

07-09-2010
Energy - Part 2 of 3
The Asteroid Belt and How It Got there After the Planet Phaeton Blew up... Will History Repeat itself?…  More...

06-21-2010
Energy - Part 1 of 3
BP's Quest for Time
The Well from Hell... and What They're Not Saying…  More...

06-03-2010
Carbs against Cardio…  More...

05-11-2010
$145 Billion and Counting…  More...

03-25-2010
The One Thing…  More...

03-24-2010
The difference between sound money and our current pulp fiction Dollar, or...why Idaho Legislators should vote "yes" on House Bills 622 and 633…  More...

03-12-2010
California Grinds to a Halt as Public and Private Unions Strike Against the State's Plans to Cut Spending and Raise Taxes…  More...

03-07-2010
Our World Balances on a Sea of Debt…  More...

02-17-2010
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle…  More...

02-10-2010
European Central Bankers Poised to Take Over Europe…  More...

02-05-2010
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows…  More...

12-21-2009
ObamaCare is not about health care; it’s about control and profits.  Oddly enough, it’s not the insurance companies; it’s the central bankers…  More...

12-07-2009
How Big is a Trillion Dollars?  More...

12-02-2009
Boise Trolley Folly DOES Justify Legislative Intervention  More...

11-06-2009
Federal Reserve to Switch to New "Scratch 'N Sniff" Currency  More...

10-27-2009
New Government Health Care Plan Struggling to Find "Single Payer" Name  More...

10-26-2009
Jesus appoints Obama as "Associate Christ"  More...

09-23-2009
Has Congress become an anachronism?  More...

09-18-2009
Leftist Boise Mayor Dave Bieter in secret meetings to blow $560 million of federal welfare dollars on downtown Boise streetcar named “Desire”… or is that a streetcar named “Huge Deficit?” More...

09-8-2009
Hey, kids, got game?  Got rap?  Wanna be a rich movie star?  “That isn’t hard work,” says Obama, “and chances are you ain’t gonna be any of those things.”  More...

09-8-2009
"Obama's speech to schools:  what civics lesson will parents teach their kids?”  More...

09-1-2009
Ted Kennedy: "Lion of the Senate" or Drunken Homicide at Chappaquiddick?  More...

08-14-2009
Two Governors Bankrupt Idaho's Highways, or Who let the GARVEE bonds out?  More...

08-07-2009
"National" health care?  Stop thinking in terms of "collectives," we are individuals  More...

08-05-2009
Fed Reserve, America's legal counterfeiting ring   More...

08-05-2009
Off Balance Sheet, Out of Mind  More...

07-23-2009
National Health Care is illogical  More...

07-09-2009
The Fed Must Be Stopped  More...

06-17-2009
Idaho Congressmen introduce Federal Streetcar Revitalization Act of 2009…ask for $300 Million to build streetcars across America…$65 Million for Boise  More...

06-12-2009
Idaho Statesman supports spending $65 million of federal stimulus booty for Boise Trolley Cars  More...

05-31-2009
Idaho Statesman thinks socialist economics can enrich economy and create Idaho jobs  More...

05-05-2009
The Idaho Transportation Solution  More...

04-23-2009
B of A CEO ordered by Fed Reserve and U.S. Treasury to shut up about Merrill Lynch's billion dollar losses   More...

04-23-2009
Boise's Watergate is alive and well as Idaho's SBOE allows U of Idaho to raid private U of Idaho Foundation for $111,000 to pay for new U of I Prez   More...

04-08-2009
Failed $250 Million University Place fiasco participant, Bob Hoover, named as president of the Idaho Community Foundation  More...

03-13-2009
More Voo-Doo Economics: "Good Bank, Bad Bank"  More...

02-17-2009
The Great "Stimulus" Hoax  More...

02-13-2009
Why President Obama’s Trillion Dollar “Stimulus” Package is Unconstitutional – Part 2  More...

02-12-2009
Why President Obama’s Trillion Dollar “Stimulus” Package is Unconstitutional – Part 1  More...

02-01-2009
Petition of the Electric Light Bulb Manufacturers  More...

01-20-2009
Obama parties down at most expensive Inauguration in history -- over $170 million -- as U.S. falls further into huge Recession  More...

12-25-2008
Is The Medicine Worse Than the Illness?  More...

12-17-2008
Idaho Statesman prints insightful Reader’s View by young economist, “Don’t fall for the Big 3’s doomsday predictions – they’re unlikely”  More...

12-14-2008
Did U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald jump the gun in premature arrest of Gov. Blagojevich?  More...

12-11-2008
Idaho Statesman editors publish whitewash of Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers to save Barack Obama…
then, up pops the FBI and Illinois Gov. Blagojevich…  More...

12-07-2008
Idaho Statesman parent McClatchy confuses socialism with free market  More...

11-29-2008
Boise’s Watergate morphs into Nampa's and Caldwell's Watergate to pay for Oregon community college in Idaho  More...

11-17-2008
Victoria's Secret Reorgs as Savings & Loan Bank, Qualifies for Treasury's $700 Billion Bailout Booty  More...

11-14-2008
Stable Money Is the Key to Recovery  More...

10-31-2008
Is America on the verge of electing a socialist Islamic terrorist supporter as U.S. President?  More...

10-25-2008
U.S. bankers whine for 30 seconds, kiss Godfather Paulson’s ass, then sign off on bank nationalization  More...

10-10-2008
‘Toys R Us’ offers to bail out U.S. economy with
injection of $700 Trillion in cash from Parker Bros. Monopoly Game…
Sweetens deal by throwing in Marvin Gardens  More...

10-06-2008
Recession 2008: The blind leading the blind  More...

09-26-2008
Congressman Ron Paul's answer to President Bush's $700 Billion bailout   More...

09-24-2008
Sec of Treasury Paulson suspends U.S. Constitution, anoints himself Wizard of Oz, demands $700 billion to unclog nation’s toilets…
Will Congress assume Dying Cockroach Position?   More...

09-15-2008
Money, money everywhere, nor any drop to drink...
U.S. Dollar is pulp fiction  More...

09-11-2008
Weekend at Fannie's  More...

09-08-2008
Idaho Statesman pushes Fascist Business Model as “Vision for the Valley”  More...

09-06-2008
Look out!
Pistol Packing Mama, Gov Sarah Palin, blasts her way into the Republican National Convention...
accepts VP slot with John McCain  More...

08-29-2008
McCain chooses Idahoan Sarah Palin, a moose-hunting, fisher-babe, free market Governor of Alaska, as Vice Prez running mate on GOP ticket  More...

08-23-2008
Idaho stockpiles $500 million to $1 billion tax surplus on top of last year's $224 million surplus?  More...

08-19-2008
Washington politicians lie about true size of budget deficit  More...

08-12-2008
Corporate Welfare Alive and Well in Idaho  More...

08-01-2008
"Covered Bonds" new mortgage gimmick by "Banksta Gangsta" Treasury Sec Hank Paulson  More...

07-17-2008
History of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reveal gross corruption, fundamental flaws  More...

07-03-2008
Zimbabwe inflation hits 1,000,000% per year…
Government central bank issues new $50 Billion denomination notes as paper currency becomes worthless  More...

06-23-2008
Idaho Supreme Court enforces socialist health care law…
Taxpayers must cough up $187,000 for illegal immigrant’s heart attack  More...

06-04-2008
Obama-Clinton “nightmare ticket” promises to drag U.S. down the road to serfdom via Marxist socialism  More...

05-30-2008
Idaho Pub Ed System Run by Village Idiots?...
State Board Asks Feds to Restart Failure Clock for “No Child Left Behind” Program  More...

05-23-2008
Global Monetary Recap - 1944 to 2008  More...

05-21-2008
Kempthorne Hugs Polar Bears, Bankrupts America  More...

05-16-2008
Yeah, Kempthorne, "Cough up" those gubernatorial records, will ya?  More...

05-11-2008
Idaho:  nuclear waste dump of America  More...

04-22-2008
2008 Legislative Report Card for Idaho: F-minus More...

04-01-2008
Fed scientists discover new element in Periodic Table of Elements:  Paper  More...

03-25-2008
Gov Butch Otter signs corporate welfare Bill for $2 billion Uranium-235 enrichment plant to set Idaho up for Perfect Nuclear Storm:  a radioactive, volcanic firestorm on top of Snake Plain Aquifer's Lake Erie  More...

03-17-2008
Who Killed the U.S. Dollar?  More...

03-08-2008
Prescription for Prosperity:  A Comprehensive Economic Revitalization Plan   More...

03-13-2008 Revised
Idaho Grocery Tax Rebate to equal 9/10 of 1% of your grocery bill?... Ooooh, Whoop-tee-doo, Governor  More...

03-03-2008
Idaho Grocery Tax Rebate to equal 3/10 of 1% of your grocery bill?... Ooooh, Whoop-tee-doo, Governor  More...

02-22-2008
Idaho Legies create Perfect Storm:  yellowcake plus Yellowstone plus Snake Plain Aquifer equals radioactive Super Volcanic blast  More...

02-14-2008
Parliament of Whores admonishes one of their own  More...

02-10-2008
Anybody Seen Our Gold?  More...

02-06-2008
(Updated 02-14-2008)
GOP and Liberal Disconnected Thought Globs (DTGs) dominate 2008 presidential debates  More...

01-31-2008
Earmarks for Idaho are good but earmarks for Alaska are bad, says Idaho Statesman  More...

01-29-2008
Osama to visit Boise on Saturday  More...

01-28-2008
Smoke 'n Mirrors Economic Stimulus Package:  $600 for you, $730,000 for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac  More...

01-24-2008
The Paper Chase:  Dollar becomes pulp fiction as Fed injects trillions into the market... But Dollar is not real capital, thus cannot stimulate economy  More...

01-19-2008
Federal Reserve drives U.S. into Super Recession, then Depression, then Martial Law  More...

01-10-2008
New Thought Police Bill passes U.S. House 404-6, awaits Senate vote  More...

01-01-2008
U.S. Federal Reserve Note:  America's Pulp Fiction  More...

12-28-2007
Who shot Pakistani ex Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto?  More...

12-19-2007
Idaho Congress-crooks Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and Rep Mike Simpson rob all Americans for Idaho earmarks More...

12-18-2007
Goldman Sachs creates subprime slime with left hand, shorts subprime slime with right hand More...

12-17-2007
Ada County to operate Detox Center for drunks & dopers?  Cost to taxpayers: $1.8 million per year  More...

12-14-2007
Central Banks Conspire to Hyper-Inflate Global Economy  More...

12-11-2007
Boise's Watergate fiasco continues as Univ of Idaho plans to blow $300 million on new marketing campaign  More...

12-10-2007
Why should Boise's "Special Olympics" be funded by taxpayer earmarks and what is the true concept behind the "Special Olympics?"  More...

12-07-2007
President Bush, Sec of Treasury Paulson save America's subprime home borrowers...you bet... Just Call Hotline to Mortgage Heaven: 1-888-995-HOPE  More...

12-03-2007
U.S. Treasury to Bail Out Billionaire Bankers on Wall Street Under Guise of Saving Subprime Borrowers  More...

12-01-2007
Idaho Gov Butch Otter Holds Secret Meeting to Tax Inner Tubes on Boise River  More...

11-26-2007
Idaho's Property Tax Solution  More...

11-16-2007
The Fed's "Prime Interest Rate" Joke  More...

11-09-2007
Idaho Statesman's parent McClatchy posts $1.4 billion loss in 3rd Qtr  More...

10-29-2007
The AMT - Worst Piece of U.S. Tax Legislation  More...

10-29-2007
What is The Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit?  Hint: It's not a plastic flex straw to a bottle of Ripple wine  More...

10-17-2007
Can Idaho U.S. Senator Larry Craig be recalled?  More...

10-13-2007
How to Recall Idaho U.S. Senator Larry Craig  More...

10-10-2007
Will the real $50 please stand up?  More...

10-03-2007
President Bush and Federal Reserve bankers plan for nationwide bankruptcy with fake 3-week flu test  More...

10-01-2007
Idaho to implement ButchCare?  More...

09-25-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... The solution:  abolish fractional reserve central banking, the Federal Reserve and govt monopoly of money; allow private minting and free choice of currencies - Part 5  More...

09-20-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... The problem:  unconstitutional  Federal Reserve plays Quantitative Economics (as if econ is physics) rather than Qualitative Economics, which is based upon individual rights and freedom - Part 4  More...

09-17-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?... Derivative markets now exceed half a quadrillion dollars or $500,000,000,000,000 of non-collateralized paper - Part 3  More...

09-16-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?...or, the root cause of today's monetary crisis and impending recession - Part 2  More...

09-15-2007
Wherein lies the value of today's paper money?...or, the root cause of today's monetary crisis and impending recession - Part 1  More...

09-05-2007
Boise's Toiletgate morphs into Pinocchio-gate as Senator Craig's nose mysteriously grows another 2 feet overnight  More...

09-02-2007
Senator Larry Craig did not resign and hired two lawyers, 1 for the Ethics Committee and 1 for the Minneapolis men's room debacle   More...

08-31-2007
Senator Larry Craig's abuse of power & lame excuses are symptomatic of long list of GOP political abuses in Idaho - Part 1  More...

08-23-2007
J'accusse, Mr. Federal Reserve did it with the Candlestick, the Rope, the Revolver, the Knife, the Wrench, and the Lead Pipe in the House, the Senate, the University, and Wall Street  More...

08-13-2007
Ada County Commissioners condemn own property through eminent domain...
Pay Cryptic Partners $3.2 million in fake "takings" - Part 1  More...

08-11-2007
Central bankers redefine "hyper-inflation" as "liquidity"... Inject over $326,000,000,000 into global economy to stave off stock market crash & recession  More...

08-10-2007
NY Stock Market crashes 387 points as sub-prime fiasco hits Germany, France  More...

08-09-2007
WSJ, Fox News pretend Ron Paul votes for earmarks  More...

08-08-2007
"The Fix" is still in, new community college trustees interview only 1 person for Prez... and guess what?  He got the job!  More...

07-30-2007
Harry Potter dies on page 597... in Boise  More...

07-18-2007
"The fix was in... But that's OK; This case warranted an inside job." -- Dan Popkey, Idaho Statesman  More...

07-17-2007
Is the War in Iraq a Mafia-style protection racket: U.S. military protects OPEC and OPEC promises to use only inflated petro-dollars?  More...

07-10-2007
Ex Ada County Commish Judy Peavey-Derr threatens libel lawsuit against Deep Throat II More...

07-05-2007
Idaho Senator Craig loses Illegal Immigration Amnesty bill...Does Craig support prison inmates picking Idaho crops? More...

07-03-2007
U.S. Constitution not signed by authors  More...

06-28-2007
"Bong Hits 4 Jesus"  More...

06-14-2007
Court transcripts reveal judge knows University Place fiasco was a financial scam and who the perps were More...

06-14-2007
Cheap Community College "need" is a hoax...BSU rated cheapest university in the nation by US News & World Report More...

06-13-2007
Ada County screws taxpayers, again...pays Cryptic Partners $1.4 million for $900,000 office space in Eminent Domain settlement  More...

06-08-2007
NO campaign thanks YES campaign for abuse of Absentee Ballots, encourages re-vote by mail  More...

06-07-2007
Scientists slap Bible Bangers' definition of "when does life begin" upside their diploid totipotent cells  More...

06-06-2007
What is America's greatest moral challenge?  More...

05-29-2007
Yo, Rudy, follow the money  More...

05-26-2007
What is paper money? More...

05-02-2007
Sec of Interior Kempthorne offers quid pro quo worth billions of dollars to Louisiana Sen Mary Landrieu  More...

04-19-2007
Supreme Court takes giant step backwards  More...

04-06-2007
House Speaker Pelosi violates U.S. Constitution and Logan Act, commits felony by impersonating Sec of State Condoleezza Rice on trip to Middle East  More...

03-28-2007
Education math scores drop across the state as Idaho teachers, administrators, and coaches vacation to Ireland and China on your tax dollars  More...

03-25-2007
Idaho GOP Legies add $400 million pork to Demo's Iraq War Bill  More...

03-23-2007
Idaho taxpayers subsidize new Micron plant in China  More...

03-19-2007
Ex Gov Kempthorne's original $3 billion Highway Plan exceeds $6 billion... Idaho Statesman says, "Pass the budget, no strings attached"  More...

03-14-2007
Low carb diet kicks government's low fat guidelines in its big fat butt  More...

03-09-2007
The paper chase... Interest rate arbitrage between the Yen and the Dollar  More...

03-08-2007
Bullet train from Boise to Meridian derailed as billion dollar local option sales tax bites the dust...poof  More...

03-01-2007
Stock market plunges 416 points in one day   More...

02-26-2007
"An Inconvenient Truth" morphs into "Convenient Lies" as Hollywood Oscars regurgitate 30-year old Doomsday baloney from the 1970s  More...

02-23-2007
Judge cries at Anna Nicole Smith hearing...wins Oscars for Best Actor, Worst Director  More...

02-22-2007
World Wide Monetary Inflation...the not-so-Good, the Bad, and the Ugly  More...

02-18-2007
Boise's Watergate morphs into Librarygate as Urban Renewal Agency picks Bodo developer for unconstitutionally-funded $130 million "Library Blocks" project  More...

02-16-2007
CAMBR fraud at U of  Idaho?  More...

02-11-2007
Who's Your Favorite Socialist Candidate for the 2008 Presidency?  More...

02-09-2007
Oink-Oink, Boise City Council Feeds at State & Federal Pig Troughs  More...

02-08-2007
Big Brother mandates vaccine for 11-year old girls  More...

01-31-2007
Ada County Commissioners condemn new Ada County Courthouse, then use Eminent Domain to confiscate their own property... huh?  More...

01-22-2007
Where in Hell did Our 3 Branches of Government Go?  More...

01-18-2007
The Real Purpose of the Federal Reserve  More...

01-17-2007
European Union Dumps German, Officially Adopts English as Universal Language  More...

01-15-2007
GOP "Intellectuals" Propose Socialist Job Corps Program to Rebuild Iraq  More...

01-08-2007
Kempthorne Plays "Polar Bear Politics"  More...

01-02-2007
Boise State outsmarts Oklahoma with Statue of Liberty fake pass, Wins Fiesta Bowl 43-42 in nail-biting overtime  More...

12-30-2006
Saddam Hussein
1937-2006  More...

12-29-2006
Shell Oil hires ex Sec of Interior Gale Norton...Conflict of interest?  More...

12-26-2006
"Black box" trading on the Big Board...is it legal... is it moral?
Part 2  More...

12-19-2006
"Black box" trading on the Big Board...is it legal... is it moral?
Part 1  More...

11-30-2006
U of I Wallace pleads guilty to state criminal charges in $136 million University Place fiasco...no fine and 3-year probation  More...

11-19-2006
If Idaho "needs" more nurses, let supply and demand in the free market automatically solve the "problem"  More...

11-17-2006
Boise "needs" a detox center like it "needs" another snort of crack  More...

11-17-2006
If Boise's "Library Blocks" project is unconstitutional, then why isn't the Courthouse project unconstitutional?  More...

11-10-2006
The Demos are coming, the Demos are coming, so now what?  More...

11-01-2006
Bag Boy Wallace Charged with Felony in U of Idaho Crime Spree...Major Perps Skate Free?  More...

10-27-2006
2006 Nobel Economist praises "Dynamic Capitalism" by assuming socialist principles  More...

10-20-2006
Voters, not the Idaho Transportation Board, must approve billion dollar highway expenditures for "Connecting Idaho"  More...

10-17-2006
Wall Street Journal physics readers argue Big Bang Theory  More...

10-06-2006
Prop 1: Idaho Teachers' union earmarks 1% of sales tax for itself  More...

09-27-2006
Anti-gay marriage amendment unconstitutional  More...

08-31-2006
Does University Place's secret civil settlement constitute "burying of public info?"  More...

08-30-2006
WSJ thinks function of Fed Reserve is "maintaining an overall stable price level"  More...

08-25-2006
Idaho leads world in "Fat Pill" production  More...

08-19-2006
Are Idaho's "Rainy Day Funds" unconstitutional?  More...

08-18-2006
Federalist Papers do not grant warrant-less searches or carte blanche wire tapping to President  More...

08-14-2006
Bodo developer proposes Boise's Watergate method to rip down, rebuild Boise main library  More...

08-07-2006
Idaho Baptists launch missiles against California Catholics?  More...

07-18-2006
Boise needs a Drug Czar like it needs a Snicker-doodle Czar  More...

07-17-2006
Billionaires Waren Buffet and Bill Gates fall ill to socialist philosophy  More...

05-31-2006
Grand Inquisitor visits Auschwitz  More...

05-22-2006
U.S. Treasury issues new Scratch N Sniff currency  More...

05-12-2006
10 Reasons why Idaho Governor Kempthorne should NOT be confirmed as Secretary of the Interior  More...

05-08-2006
Is it simply La Cage aux Folles at the Kempthorne Confirmation Hearing or will somebody ask a real question?  More...

04-24-2006
U.S. Constitution declared unconstitutional...
not signed by its authors, or anybody else  More...

04-17-2006
Idaho Teachers' union pushes Initiative for  Guaranteed Annual Income by earmarking 1% of sales tax for itself  More...

04-10-2006
University Place perps agree to not sue themselves...Pay each other $8.3 million...Cryptic Partners remains as possible 'fall guy' - Part II More...

04-03-2006
University Place perps agree to not sue themselves...Pay each other $8.3 million...Cryptic Partners remains as possible 'fall guy' - Part I More...

03-27-2006
JFAC gives blank check for Governor Kempthorne's Highway Robbery  More...

03-20-2006
Boise's Watergate goes to Washington... Governor Kempthorne nominated as Secretary of Interior  More...

03-06-2006
Is Idaho's $3 Billion GARVEE Highway Debt Unconstitutional?  More...

02-20-2006
Why Idaho's Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment is Pretended Law...Part II  More...

02-13-2006
Why Idaho's Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment is Pretended Law...Part I  More...

02-06-2006
Why we don't need property taxes...Part II  More...

01-30-2006
Why we don't need property taxes...Part I  More...

01-09-2006
Santa 'Clause' shows up to save Florida's Teachers' Union  More...

09-19-2005
Did Japanese mafia steer Hurricane Katrina down Bourbon Street for fun and profit...or revenge?  More...

09-12-2005
Why we don't need FEMA or Boise's "Blueprint for Good Growth"  More...

09-05-2005
Should Idaho abolish property taxes and implement a flat sales tax?  More...

08-22-2005
Gov Kempthorne is not our "CEO"  More...

07-11-2005
Ethnomathematics  More...

06-20-2005
Fat Idaho  More...

04-18-2005
The Fuzzy Math of U.S. Coinage  More...

04-11-2005
Birth:  Nature's Transfer of Private Property Rights  More...

03-14-2005
Whose Collective Rights?  More...

02-28-2005
Is Micron Whining for Corporate Welfare or Demanding Free Market Capitalism?  More...

02-21-2005
Catholicism in Latin America Morphs into Socialism  More...

01-31-2005
Oil Companies Turn Earth into Giant CO2 Soda Pop Bottles  More...

01-24-2005
Idaho Legislature Repeals Itself? ...
Anti-gay Marriage:  The State vs. The Individual  More...

01-17-2005
Idaho's Looming Fake Health Care "Crisis" More...

10-25-2004
America's Intellectual Hierarchy More...

09-27-2004
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
A panda walks into a café.  He orders a sandwich, eats it, then pulls out a gun and blasts two shots into the ceiling.   More...

10-11-2004
Anti-gay Marriage:  The State vs. The Individual  More...

10-04-2004
Evolution Of Math Instruction In California Public Schools  More...

Why Johnny Can't Read  More...

Does surgery for cancer cause more cancer?   More...

When Good Cells Go Bad (cancer:  who's right: viral theory or trophoblast theory?)  More...

Health Care Is Not A Right  More...

This amazing cartoon was in the Chicago Tribune in 1934. Look carefully at the plan of action.  Note who's driving the out-of-control wagon:  university professors.  Note Stalin and Karl Marx babbling the same type of Obama fascist Progressive plan to "fundamentally transform" America.  Remember the adage, "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

Sound money is a basic human right, derived from private property rights.  Alasdair Macloed says it best:  "Firstly, it is a basic human right to choose to save without our savings being debased by the tax of monetary inflation. Those who are worst affected by this inflation tax are not the rich -- they benefit -- but the poor and the barely well-off, which is why monetary inflation undermines society and why the right to sound money should be respected. If government gives itself a monopoly over money, it has a duty to protect the property rights vested in it.

"Secondly, it is a basic right for us to own our own money rather than have it owned by the banks. For them to take our money and expand credit on the back of it debases it. It is an abuse of an individual's property rights and a banking licence is a government licence to do so. If anyone else was to do this, they would be guilty of fraud. Banks should be custodians of our money, and it should not appear in their balance sheets as their property."

"How ironic and sad, then, that advocates of recognizing gold and silver as money, as was done in not-so-olden times, should be characterized as conservatives, reactionaries, and worse when they are actually liberators and when advocates of infinitely 'elastic' currency are actually the great enablers of totalitarianism throughout the world.

"Sound money guarantees a stable yet progressive economy where people are truly equal. It allows people to save properly for their retirement so that they will not become a burden on the state. It leads to democracy voting for small governments. It encourages peaceful trade and discourages war. It is the only path, after this mess, that leads us to long-lasting and peaceful prosperity. We really need everyone to understand this for the sake of our future."

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men... they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it. – Frederic Bastiat, The Law [1850]  Sound familiar in 2012?  Look around.

Must see movie out on DVD:

"V" for Vendetta...
"The people should not be afraid of their government; Governments should be afraid of their people."

   “Who are you?”

   “Who?  Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.”

   “Well, I can see that.”

   “Of course you can.  I’m not questioning your powers of observation.  I’m merely remarking on the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.”

   “Oh, right.”

   “But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the most commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this most dramatis personae:

   Voila!  In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate.

   This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished.  However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

    The only verdict is vengeance, a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.”

    Did You Know...?   

   The Ten Commandments contain 297 words.  The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words.  Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words.  A recent federal directive regulating the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.

   Amendment X to the Constitution of the United States, together with Article I, Section 8, prohibits the U.S. Congress from involving itself in cabbage pricing, education, health care, personal safety, campaign financing, most criminal law, toilet capacity, the banning of amino acid supplements (such as tryptophan), vitamins (such as B-17) and thousands of other things it has gotten away with so far.

       Quickie News Briefs     

Sunday May 13, 2012

--  Tue May 08 (updated)  Yahoo, folks!  France just went gung-ho socialist as they recently voted out previous mild socialist President Sarkhozy and elected wild-ass socialist Jean Paul Francois Karl Marx Jr.  Watch how Jean Paul Francois Karl Marx taxes the "rich" at 75% and drives all producers to Germany, or to the U.S., and/or into retirement since who the hell is going to risk their capital to run a business just so Jean Paul Francois Karl Marx can confiscate everything to redistribute to all the deadbeat union thugs who are too busy rioting in the streets to go to work.  The rioters are too busy demanding more entitlement cookies from the government to show up to a job.  Sound like somebody we know in the US whose initials are Barack Hussein Karl Marx Obama?  Ya-yess, girl friends.  Next, watch Greece as it walks in the same socialist footsteps as France and tries to inflate its ass out of their recession because they, too, don't understand that debt paper inflation and government spending is exactly how they got into their recession, too.  You cannot hyper-inflate your way to riches and employment.  Sorry Lord John Maynard Keynes.  Stay tuned as Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the rest of those who are still in the European Union finally break out of both the Euro currency and the European Union and revert back to their former little provincial warring selves, spending their butts into oblivion with their own national hyper-inflated currencies as they dump the Euro.  Don't worry.  The central bankers will end up controlling all the little provincial nations' paper and plastic money anyway, whether it's the Euro or the Lira or the Peso or Parker Bros. Monopoly Money.  But, one thing you can be sure of:  the central bankers will control all the gold.  Because gold is the only real money around.  The real Ponzi Scheme is how the European Central bankers and the US Federal Reserve convinced everybody in all nations to exchange their gold for plastic and paper debt.  What a bunch of dummies.  Bon chance, Francois!

--  Tue May 01  For all you Idaho voters in District 19 Precinct 01 in Ada County -- hey, that includes Boise North End, Hidden Springs, and parts of Eagle -- you can run down to the Ada County Records Dept on Benjamin Street and vote between now and May 15th for Harry Lear for District 1901 GOP precinct committeeman.  What do precinct committee people do?  We party down every month just like the federal government's GSA on your dime.  No, no, just kidding.  We discuss issues relevant to the GOP party -- which now contains a lot of Libertarians and fiscal Conservatives.  It's a lively group.  We vote on the direction and finances for the Ada County GOP party in the Treasure Valley.  When legislators or other elected officials leave an office vacant, we choose three candidates to recommend to the Governor to appoint a replacement.  We attend the state and national Electoral Conventions at which the President of the US is nominated.  And so on.  Those of you who are Democrats in District 1901 should probably choose the Democrat ballot at the May 15 Primary and vote for you favorite precinct committeeman.  This position is non-partisan in that the GOP has its precinct committee people and the Demos have their own -- and never the twain shall meet, as in the General Elections -- unless they are down at The Merc in Hidden Springs chugging a beer.  So, whether you vote early at the Ada County Records Dept on Benjamin Street (cross streets are Franklin and Emerald) or by absentee ballot or down at the fire station or local school, please vote for your local precinct committeeman.  In precinct 1901, for the GOP, that would be me:  Harry Lear.  Thanks in advance for your vote.  By the way, if you live in Mississippi or another state or maybe Australia, you could drive/fly to Boise, Idaho and try to vote for me, too -- but I wouldn't recommend it unless you were already planning on rafting the Boise River in two weeks.

--  Mon Apr 30  The following article published in The Huffington Post -- a left Liberal blog -- is very revealing in that it appears that at least some Liberals are beginning to catch on to what President Snow is really up to.  It's a must read.

 04-30-2012
Martial Law By Executive Order  More...

--  Fri Apr 27  The EPA issued an edict to crucify specific oil companies in order to use them as show case examples RE what could happen to all other oil companies who don't comply with whatever the EPA dictates.  President Snow's little cronies busy at work.  And if it works for the oil industry, why not use the same methodology on all other industries?  That's what happens when an entire culture accepts the premise that it is the function of the President in a supposedly limited republic to act as if he is the CEO of the United States and try to micro-manage everything and everybody all the time and everywhere by suspending every citizen's individual rights, the Constitution, and destroying the entire free market -- just because he doesn't understand what freedom is or how prices can only form in a free market.  That president should rightly be referred to as an Economic Dictator.  Shades of Benito Mussolini and other dictators throughout history.

--  Thur Apr 26  In an Article in the Wall Street Journal today, Congress Finally Takes on The Fed, by George Melloan, the author asserts:

"The Fed's near-zero interest rate policy has punished savers without producing a strong recovery. Two bills in Congress would rein in the central bank.  [Hoo boy, FM Duck starts salivating... but wait...]

"Two bills now before Congress make it clear that legislators are finally giving serious attention to a much-needed reform of the Federal Reserve System."  [Oh boy, again, drool, drool, END THE FED, right?]

Wrong.  Pay close attention to what it is, exactly, that the author, George Melloan, states is the real problem and why the Federal Reserve should continue to exist.

"The most recent effort is the Sound Dollar Act (H.R. 4180) introduced in the House in March by Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. A companion bill was put before the Senate by Mike Lee (R., Utah). The Sound Dollar Act has far more hope of passage than the more radical H.R. 1098, introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) last year. H.R. 1098 would repeal the legal tender laws, end the Fed's monopoly on money creation, and allow the private production and use of gold and silver as specie."

Bingo!  This is the real solution:  END THE FED!  But George the Author thinks that's too radical since his intention is not really to rein in the existence of the Fed but rather to simply rearrange economic deck chairs on America's financial Titanic.  Not understanding the basic philosophical principals underlying private property rights, what constitutes real money, why prices can only be created in a true free market, and, therefore, WHY the mere existence of a national central bank is a contradictory concept within free market economics, WSJ author George Melloan accepts the premise that the Fed is good, but that its only goal should be to "maintain price stability."

Maintain price stability?

Wait a New York minute here.  It is not the function of any bank, much less a central federal bank, to try to "stabilize" the price of any commodity in the free market.  "Stabilize" means control.  Control is the opposite of freedom, which means not allowing free market prices to form in a free market.  One of the basic premises in Austrian Free Market Economic theory is that the movement of prices, up and down including sometimes wild movements, signal to entrepreneurs and speculators and businessmen WHERE to put their capital.  That is what free market capitalism is all about.  Allowing capital to freely respond quickly ameliorates price instability in the market.  In other words, price instability is what we want to be able to detect in the free market.  If a federal agency hides or controls the prices of commodities by bureaucratic decree, we lose the ability for the free market to make corrections and thus bring supply and demand into the best condition being requested by the producers and consumers.  What the WSJ author George Melloan is suggesting in his article is that (1) we have no individual private property rights, (2) price changes in the market must be inherently bad, and (3) it therefore must be the function of Government -- through a central bank -- to regulate the formation of prices through a monopoly monetary policy such as fiat currency production, inflation, devaluation of the dollar, and outright total control of the money supply.  Wow, George of The Wall Street Journal.  If this is the reasoning of one of the best authors that the WSJ has to offer, we do not need enemies of the free market when our supposed "friends" of free market capitalism are busy putting forth bad reasons for retaining the Federal Reserve.  At least President Obama and the Liberals come right out and say they are against the free market as they try to tear it down.  The WSJ and many of its various authors pretend they support the free market and individual rights as they stab you in your private property back.

--  Thur Apr 26  If you are worried about the continually increasing price of a gallon of gas, ponder the following and ask yourself why we are still burning fossil fuel for energy when it is cheaper to pull free energy from the space/time continuum called "the vacuum."

Quoting the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking:

“There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle parts. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. …now twice zero is also zero. Thus the universe can double the amount of positive matter energy and also double the negative gravitational energy without violation of the conservation of energy. …"It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch." [Stephen D. Hawking, A Brief History of Time.].

Added physicist and defense department consultant  Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, "We don’t have a world energy crisis per se, because the seething vacuum energy is easily available, inexhaustible, and ubiquitous – and clean!. Instead, we have an energy from fuel crisis, because we have a world fuel crisis and we insist on only going after energy from fuel. Obviously the answer is to get off the 'energy from fuel' kick, and go for 'fuel-free' energy from the vacuum!"  Bearden should know.  He and John Bedini at Energenx Corporation hold multiple patents on extracting free energy from the "vacuum" and have even produced a solid state "machine."  So why isn't the whole world and Obama dashing over to implement this inexpensive new "Mouse Trap?"  Simple.  The current fossil fuel energy cartel is a trillion dollar a year business.  And so is the Federal Reserve that finances the same crooks.  Ever hear of the Brettonwoods Agreement with OPEC and The Petro Dollar Deal?  No?  Tisk, tisk.  Too bad.  Build you own personal free energy machine to run your home, keep your big mouth shut, and maybe the cartel won't bother you.  Maybe.

--  Wed Apr 25  President Snow is busy hitting the college campus circuit to whip all the little socialists into a frenzied lather to vote for him in the 2012 Elections.  How?  Easy peezy lemon squeazy.  He's promising them "free" education.  And free lunches.  And free everything else.  Free free free!  Yahoo, take it all from the dirty pig pirate rich and give it to the college kids so they will vote for him.  And their mommies and daddies will get free government jobs from President Snow.  In all 12 Districts.  Just before their kids are selected for President Snow's Hunger Games.  What fun he has in store for all the little economic idiots who have absolutely no clue whatsoever what's in store for them in the future.  May the odds be with you, suckers...

--  Tue Apr 24  Obamarama, our Supreme Socialist Economic Dictator, has now signed HR Bill 347.  HR Bill 347 shreds your First Amendment rights to freedom of speech if you carry a protest sign or whip out a bullhorn anywhere near The Supreme Dictator's Secret Service personnel.  Like across the street from our Dictator's Hilton Hotel on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk.  Habeus corpus?  Gone, too.  It's still OK to breathe the air in your own home... for now.  Maybe Obama's real name is President Snow and we have all been chosen for The Hunger Games?

--  Mon Apr 09  Happy Easter Yesterday... brought to you by all the chicken ranchers and Hallmark Cards franchises all across America.  This is the day that Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead but it has been greatly commercialized for decades.  We are still trying to figure out why parents teach their children that Jesus rising from the dead had anything to do with the fairytale of giant rabbits supposedly hiding colorfully-painted chicken eggs in people's back yards and parks across America.  I mean it appears to be all good fun and such, but sometimes we must wonder what is running through our kids' brains after we tell them these type of morality fairytales.  Perhaps that's why the same children, as adults, believe in the fairytales of our politicians and central bankers.  Take a good look at our US economy in 2012 and all the lies the President and Congress and news media are telling us about how we got into our current economic Depression:  well, you see, the banks were on the verge of collapse so we had to print up lots more Monopoly Money, strip you of your freedoms, force you to buy commodities you don't want to buy, send your kids off to fight made-up wars in the Middle East that were concocted by the Federal Reserve's and OPEC Petro Dollar Deal and then President Snow had to nationalize GM to save it from Goldilocks and the Three Bears and then Santa Claus came along in a sled in the dead of winter and slid down your chimney with free presents and Deputy Dawg and Snagglepuss the Mangey Lion said, "Which way did he go, George, which way did he go..." and on and on and on...  No wonder the world is so screwed up.  We're running our lives on fairytales instead of the truth.  How many Easter eggs did you find in your city's Hunger Games this year?

--  Thur Apr 05  Whoa, girl friends, pull up the barn floor, shut up, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Presumed President Barack Obama, three days ago, threatened the US Supreme Court by stating on national TV that they -- as "unelected judicial officials," -- should not (or did he say "do not?") have the authority to overturn any law, statute, or act that was passed by a majority of democratically elected Congressmen.  The "law" Obama was referring to, of course, was his national socialized health care program -- ObamaCare -- that the US Supremes have been hearing oral arguments about for the last week.  Well, excuuuuse me!  Just what does President Obama think is the prime function of the US Supreme Court if it is not to review and determine whether laws brought before it are constitutional or not?  Why does he think there are 3 branches of government?  Has he never heard of Checks and Balances enumerated in the US Constitution for the 3 branches of government?  Has he not read The Federalist Papers that explain -- and were written by the same authors of -- the US Constitution: Hamilton, Jay, and Madison?  Only individuals obtain rights from Nature and God.  The 3 branches of government do not obtain "rights" from anywhere.  Their authority is the "enumerated powers" that must be expressly stated in the US Constitution.  And when the Legislature oversteps its enumerated powers, the US Supreme Court can strike it down.  Period.  That's their job.  President Obama further stated that no Supreme Court has overturned such legislation in, hmm, let's see about umpteen hundred years.  Buzz, wrong.  The Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison in 1803 said yes the Justices can overturn unconstitutional law.  For over 200 years the Supreme Court -- who Mr. Obama should have learned in Harvard Bonehead Law 101A -- has overturned more than a hundred cases passed by Congress as unconstitutional.  And on which park bench where were you asleep, Mr. President from Harvard Law School, when they discussed Marbury v. Madison?  How in hell did you teach law to students as an Associate Prof at Harvard without telling them all about M. v. M.?  It just goes to show that not only is it President Obama's agenda to "fundamentally transform" America by totally dumping the entire US Constitution, he now traipses in front of the national TV news media -- in between poring over his basketball picks during College March Madness -- to use his Executive Branch podium as a bully pulpit to try and influence a future decision by the current US Supreme Court about his own unconstitutional Health Care law.  What he is actually doing is trying to convince the US public in an election year that he has the right to lecture the Supreme Court about its judicial duties, hoping that most Americans won't know any better.  Fortunately for us, but unfortunate for Obama, an appellate court judge in the 5th Circuit called Obama's bluff.  Judge Smith in Texas, reviewing a related but different ObamaCare case, told Obama's DOJ lawyer that the President's statements were very serious and cause for judicial concern.  He, therefore, ordered Obama's Head Honcho DOJ -- US Attorney General Eric Holder, already in trouble for his absurd "fast and furious" furnishing of automatic weapons to Mexican drug lords to track them down, but backfired in the murder of an American border agent -- to do some constitutional homework.  Namely, Holder and Obama have been ordered by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to produce a minimum 3-page document, single spaced, showing how and why the President's accusations that "unelected judges" -- i.e., the 9 Justices on the US Supreme Court -- do not or should not have the authority to review and/or overturn laws brought before them as unconstitutional.  Paper due:  3 pm Thursday, April 5th.  I suspect Holder and Obama will receive an automatic F- on whatever absurd paper they write.  Mostly because, a priori, it can't be anything except pure bullshit encapsulated in pure horse shit. That's shit-squared for all you mathematicians out there.

--  Sat Mar 31  After a week of the US Supreme Court discussing the most important constitutional case to come down the Pike in more than a century, the national TV stations NBC and CBS spent a whole 4 minutes reporting about it.  TV station ABC said nothing.  Zip, zero, nada.  And why is that, do you suppose?  Because at first glance, the left Liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Breyer, are getting their asses kicked even though the so-called conservative Justices are trying to kick their butts by agreeing with the left Liberal Justices basic premises that the federal government has the authority in many instances to stomp on every citizen's  inherent rights obtained a priori to said citizens' establishment of a limited government.  It's as if both the Liberals and Conservatives were a bunch of schizophrenics by claiming that a group of individuals forming a nation obtained their inalienable rights from Nature or God, and then said citizens went forward and declared in a document -- the US Constitution -- that they did not obtain inherent rights from Nature or God but rather from the very document they created due to the fact that they did have that right a priori to the creation of the document that then denies it.  Duh?  So naturally the left Liberals then claim that individuals get their rights from the government -- you know, like special favors and welfare grants -- while the Conservatives contradictorily claim individuals get their rights from God but the government can override those rights if one can present enough Marxist philosophy along the lines of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."  Which, in effect, is the same thing as saying they agree with the basic altruistic state collectivist premises of the left Liberals and can thus throw the US Constitution -- plus the  argument of a priori-obtained rights of the individual from Nature or God right into the trash can.  Either you have a priori rights from God or Nature or you don't.  If you don't establish that as your axiomatic primary in social-political-economics, they you must necessarily lose every single argument about individual rights.  And, therefore, it is not a foregone conclusion that the Conservative Justices, about 5 of them, will out vote the left Liberal Justices, about 4 of them, and uphold President Obama's insidious attempt to totally dump the handbook of How To Run The United States of America:  i.e. the US Constitution.  When Obama stated that he was looking to "fundamentally change" the way in which America is run, you better believe that he really did mean, "FUNDAMENTALLY."   He was not just talking about changing the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and dumping all the explanations in the Federalist Papers.  He meant that he was dumping the entire philosophical premises upon which the US Constitution was established:  the a priori rights of the individual obtained -- from Nature or God since the government had yet to be established -- before the creation of the Founding document.  Obama wants to destroy the concept of inalienable inherent rights and replace it with government grants.  This, of course, is a philosophical throwback to before the Age of Reason and The Age of Enlightenment in which it was presumed that the individual obtained his/her rights from those in charge:  The Divine Right of Kings, or the Divine Right of the Pope.  Obama's idea is the Divine Right of The Government, which means himself and his cronies in charge.  Make no mistake about it.  The decision by the US Supreme Court will be a landmark, a turning point in whether the US survives as a limited constitutional Republic or becomes a collectivist fascist state.  It may behoove you, the reader at FM Duck, to tune into www.c-span.org and listen to the Supreme Court Justices discuss this issue.  It will affect you in many ways.  In fact, you life and the lives of your children and grandchildren will depend on their decision.

--  Thur Mar 29  Just saw the movie The Hunger Games and must say that it was everything that it was cracked up to be, namely the screen play followed the storyline of the book 99%.  That may well be due to the fact that author Suzanne Collins was on the team of screen writers for the movie, too.  A rare event.  The movie is turning out to be a box office winner, third highest in one weekend for gross receipts.  As I stated before in a review in these columns, left Liberal Progressives will not like either the book or the movie because it hits too close to home vis a vis their moral philosophy of state collectivism.  Listening to the oral arguments of the 9 Justices on the US Supreme Court over the last 3 days regarding the repeal of ObamaCare and how it infringes upon individual rights, the irony of it all is that many of the arguments being put forth by some of the Justices may as well have come out of the mouth of The Hunger Games' Capitol Dictator President Snow, trying to justify a State Dictatorship over individual rights and freedoms.  Tune into www.c-span.org and listen to some of the ridiculous anti-individual rights and anti-free market arguments -- and continual interruption of the attorneys trying to present their cases -- as Justices Ginsberg, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer rest their assertions for ObamaCare on previous governmental intrusions into the free market and dissolution of private property rights.  Like, if we robbed you for growing wheat (FDR), Medicare (LBJ), Social Security, Amtrak, the USPS, the Income Tax, creating a monopoly central bank (Federal Reserve), and Race To The Top nationalized Public Education last year, it's OK to rob you for health care this year.  And next year we will use ObamaCare as another supposedly legal precedent to rob you for socialized computers, cars, popcorn, and performing sex in your bedroom on Wednesdays.  When will it all end, you ask?  Well that's just the point:  Obama's and the Progressives' state interventionism will never end.  It's not supposed to.  That's the fundamental hope and change to the US Constitution that President Snow -- I mean President Obama -- has been seeking for the last 4 years.  It's called a government dictatorship.  Economic fascism with the Government trying to micromanage every aspect of the economy.  It's called: The Hunger Games.

--  Mon Mar 26  Mr. and Mrs. Mike Sackett of Idaho just kicked the Environmental Protection Agency in the butt last week with a little help from the US Supreme Court.  The Court told the EPA to take a flying leap as it revoked a previous ruling by lower courts that ordered the couple to stop building a house on land they owned in Idaho.  The Sackett's land had temporarily gotten wet from a minor log jam on a dinky river near their property.  A rare occurence.  The dumb-dumb bureaucrats at the EPA claimed that because the Sackett's property got wet -- even in a rare temporary event -- that constituted that their land be classified as "wetlands" under the Clean Water Act and that the Sackett's needed a permit to build a house on said property.  The EPA told the Sackett's they would be fined some God awful huge amount in daily fines if they refused to stop building.  So Mike and Chantell took the bureaucrats to court, appealing it all the way up to the US Supreme Court after losing lower court battles.  The Supremes not only ruled in the Sackett's favor but also provided Kentucky US Senator Rand Paul with a hint on how to prevent future abuse of US citizens by the over reaching zealots at the EPA.  Mainly, the court ruled that landowners can sue to challenge EPA compliance orders that are issued under the Clean Water Act.  "The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear.  Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the act," wrote Justice Alito in his concurrence.  "The court's decision provides a modest measure of relief," he added.  "Real relief requires Congress to do what it should have done in the first place: provide a reasonably clear rule regarding the reach of the Clean Water Act."  To that end, Senator Paul has authored a bill -- the Defense of Environment and Property Act -- that would limit the scope of the Clean Water Act, which Justice Samuel Alito helpfully identified as the real problem.  Perhaps in the future, a sequel to Senator Paul's Act might be a total repeal of that obnoxious and mis-named Agency:  Environmental Protection.  True environmental protection already falls within the Constitutional concept of individual private property rights and liberties.

--  Sun Mar 25  OK, girl friends, The Hunger Games movie is now playing at a theatre near you.  Read the book first, check out the following FM Duck book review, and then go see the movie.  Hint:  The Hunger Games is not some young adult teeny bopper love story.  it's not about bows and arrows and random violence.  It's about individual liberty vs. the collectivist State.  It's about today, the slow step-by-step taking away of your rights and freedoms by an all-encompassing central government.  It's about losing your rights and freedoms under President Snow's ObamaCare; it's about federal control of your child's education in President Snow's Race To The Top; it's about national control of your money by the Central Bank, The Federal Reserve; it's about the TSA frisking you at the airport; it's about President Snow pushing to censor the Internet; it's about President Snow claiming he can arrest and hold you indefinitely without a warrant, losing your right of habeas corpus, and even shooting you as a "terrorist combatant" on American soil; and on and on.  Once again, on a higher intellectual level, The Hunger Games is about:  individual liberty vs. the collectivist State.  It is important for you to teach your children about this subject because they will not learn about it in President Obama Snow's nationalized public education game called Race To The Top -- which is really a race to the bottom, built upon former President Bush's national education program Leave No Child Behind.  What a predictable flow of America's Progressive Education System.  Think about it:  first, it's Leave No Child Behind, then it's Race To The Top, and finally The Hunger Games, where kids get screwed at all three progressive levels of State control.  Prediction:  left Liberal Progressives will not like The Hunger Games because it hits too close to home, too close to their statist, socialist, fascist, collectivist philosophy.  Fiscal Conservatives, Independents, and Libertarians will love all three books in The Hunger Games trilogy and the movie, too.  Does Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, really understand the underlying philosophy -- metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy (ethics), political economy, and finally the role of art, the refueling of your moral philosophy -- that her novels encompass?  Or did she just happen to have enough self esteem and piece together enough of an understanding about individual rights philosophy from whatever she has read about The Age of Enlightenment -- the same philosophy that was then established in our U.S. Constitution by America's Founding Fathers?  I don't know and, so far, Collins has not indicated that she created and structured her Hunger Games trilogy based upon anything except a cursory traversing of national TV shows with her remote control one evening, thus summarizing the national news, game shows, the wars in the Middle East, and so-called competition shows such as Survivor.  As far as I can tell, Suzanne Collins is no Ayn Rand, either as story-teller or philosopher.  But that's good.  Personally, I think Collins is a better novelist and Rand is the better philosopher.  The major difference between Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is that The Hunger Games tells it like it is while Atlas Shrugged tells you why and how we got there.

03-05-2012
Fm Duck Book Review:  The Hunger Games  More...

--  Mon  Mar 19  Whoa, girlfriends, remember last week when the Greek government robbed their bond holders by re-issuing said bond debt at 50% of the original bond value?  And now the European Central Bank (ECB) has just exercised its droit du seigneur which excludes said bond devaluation for the central bank.  Droit du seigneur is a "legal" rape job, referring to an alleged legal right allowing the lord of a medieval estate to take the virginity of his serfs' maiden daughters.  So I guess the Federal Reserve isn't the only central bank that is busy screwing over its bond holders.  And President Barack Obama joined the gang bang in America when he nationalized General Motors, stripping the GM bond holders of all the value of their investment and giving it away to the United Auto Workers union.  Wow, doit du seigneur, Monsieur Obama, droit du seigneur!

--  Sun Mar 18  Want to know how to abruptly end a useless conversation with your left Liberal friends?  If you have any?  It's easy.  Just ask them how the Federal Reserve creates money.  They do not know.  And they will tell you that not only don't they not know, they also don't care or think it's important.  That's why they're Liberals.   Because they only know how to argue for a social welfare state and have no clue how to pay for it.  In fact, money doesn't even enter into any of their discussions except for their favorite phrase, "Let's tax the rich."  The stupidos don't even realize that taxing the rich is tantamount to claiming, "Hey, let's have some fun and snort some cyanide today.  That will clear up our sinuses."  Uh-huh.  Smart.  Why is it stupid to tax the rich in a free market economy?  Because -- let's put this in really, really simple terms -- if you eat up all your seed corn -- now play close attention -- you will have nothing left to plant for the next season.  (We call it savings or capital goods.)  Then -- looking really, really far ahead... like next month -- you will simply starve to death.  So all the left Liberals, including our Chief Economic Village Idiot of a President, Barack Obama, may as well be screaming, "Oh boy, do I have a great NEW idea!  Let's pop all of America's seed corn into popcorn and watch a great movie like, hmmm, how about Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games!"  Uh-huh.  "Then, if we're still alive, we can eat all of our paper money and watch the 2nd movie in the trilogy, Catching Fire."  Uh-huh.  "And don't worry about watching the 3rd movie in the trilogy, Mockingjay, because there won't be anything left to see."  Yeah, says President Snow, that's the Hope and Change Suicide Plan we left Liberal Progressives want everybody to die for... literally... so we can implement... let's see now, so we can implement... hmm... where's that Marx and Engels' script now... ?

--  Sun Mar 18  Now may not be the time for you to visit your favorite Greek Isle.  No, not because Greece is bankrupt and the Greekonians are rioting in the streets.  The volcanic caldera called Santiago or Sanitation or Santorum just south of Crete is registering a lot of activity, according to seismologists at Virginia U.  The caldera is filling up with hot lava -- is there such a thing as cold lava -- and may be getting ready to explode.  Then again, maybe not.  Are you feeling lucky today?  Then go ahead and jump on that Princess Ocean Cruise Liner and surf what may become 100 foot high tsunamis on your way to Greece.

--  Wed Mar 14  The price of gasoline is not going up.  The value of the dollar is going down.  Why?  Because the government is printing up trillions of dollars of non-backed paper and digitized currency each year.  Trillions and trillions of fake dollars.  There is no energy crisis.  There is a monetary crisis.  The fact that Americans concentrate on the price of gas rather than the value of money is indicative of our culture's lack of understanding about what money really is.  And that's why we are in the Greatest Economic Recession since the 1930's.

--  Tue Mar 13  Well, happy baklava to you, too, Boo-Boo.  Greece implemented the greatest robbery -- oops, I mean debt write-down -- in history on Monday, swapping the bulk of its privately-held bonds with new ones worth less than half their original value.  Let me break that down for you in street talk, girl friends.  It's like you loaned (invested) $100,000 to the Greek government last year and received a piece of paper (a bond) that said the Greek government promises to repay you your $100,000 plus interest AND then yesterday the Greek government repaid you $50,000 for your $100,000 bond.  Whoa, ain't you lucky?  They just took you to the cleaners for $50K, babe.  And the Greek government says, whew now we can remain solvent, sort of, kinda like, well, who knows.  But what we do know is that you, the government bond investor just lost 50% of your investment to a bunch of rotten politicians AND -- let's not forget who's behind all of this mess in the first place -- central bankers, like, you know, Da IMF.  That's right, the International Monetary Fund who is busy loaning Parker Brothers Monopoly Money to all the European Nations currently going bankrupt from incurring their previous billion Euro debts.  Without robbing the bond holders -- oops, I mean without the Big Swap -- Greece's politicians would have had to declare dum-da-dum:  total default, as in a total bankruptcy.  Wow, good thing the IMF was hanging around out in the lobby with a cashier's check to rob the bond holders -- oops, I mean to save the Greek economy.  Oh, by the way, all you bond holders in Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Britain, Germany, Portugal, and the United States:  are you feeling lucky?  Going to hang onto your government T-Bills, backed by the full faith and CREDIT of your respective government?  Hey, China, do you trust the US Government to cover those trillions in US bonds?  At par value?  Right.  Uh-huh.  Suckers.

--  Mon Mar 12  You know your society is doomed:

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing.

When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors.

When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you.

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice. -- Ayn Rand, 1958

--  Tue Mar 06  Today is Super Tuesday for 10 states in the 2012 presidential elections.  The following states and their delegates for the national GOP convention are:  Idaho 32, Georgia 76, Ohio 66, Tennessee 58, Virginia 49, Oklahoma 43, Massachusetts 41, North Dakota 28, Alaska 27, and Vermont 17.

Take Back The Whitehouse in 2012!  Vote at the Idaho Ada County Republican Presidential Caucus.

What:  Historic opportunity for Idaho Republicans to help decide who gets nominated as the GOP Presidential candidate.  The Caucus determines Idaho's 32 delegates at the National GOP Convention.

When:  Tuesday, March 6th, 7 pm.  Doors open at 4 pm and you must be in line by 7 pm to participate.

Where:  Taco Bell Arena, Boise State University

Who:  Open to All Registered Republicans (you can register at the event).

More Info:  www.adacountyrepublicans.com

Be there or be square.

--  Mon Feb 27  The following history of how many paper dollars it takes to equal one troy oz of gold clearly shows what the Federal Reserve bankers and US politicians have been doing to our currency.  Feast your eyeballs on the following forty years of dollar depreciation, inflation, and transference of the fruits of your labor to those in power:

Date          Gold Price/oz

Aug 1971     $     35
Aug 1972     $     38
May 1973     $     42
Jan  1980     $   850
Aug 1999     $   252
Oct  1999     $   338
Jan  2004     $   400
Nov  2005     $   500
Apr  2006     $   600
May  2006    $   730
Jun  2006     $   540
Nov  2007     $   845
Jan  2008     $   850
Mar  2008     $ 1,030
Dec  2009     $ 1,200
May  2010     $ 1,230
Jun  2010     $ 1,265
Sep  2010     $ 1,300
Oct  2010      $ 1,360
Nov  2010     $ 1,400
Dec  2010     $ 1,425
Mar  2011     $ 1,447
Apr  2011     $ 1,476
May 2011     $ 1,569
Jul   2011     $ 1,600
Aug  2011     $1,918
Sep  2011     $ 1,700
Oct   2011     $ 1,600
Nov  2011      $ 1,740
Dec  2011      $ 1,635
Jan  2012      $  1,700
Feb  2012      $  1,770

Silver:  2010  $18 per troy oz.
           2011  $32 per troy oz.
           2012  $38 per troy oz.

--  Mon Feb 27  Lest you think America could never reach the hyper-inflation absurdities of Germany's Weimar Republic, you are witnessing this process right now as it unfolds in Washington, DC.

Economic History Lesson 101A, Weimar Republic, Germany, 1920s  In 1914, Germany’s Fed Reserve, the Reichsbank, suspended conversion of its paper money into gold.  By November 1923, after continual “injections of liquidity,” Reich Marks in circulation soared past 92.8 quintillion Marks and skyrocketed past 496 quintillion Marks through July of 1924.  On Oct 25, 1923, the Reichsbank apologized that it had been able to only print 120 quadrillion Marks that day, but the demand was for one quintillion Marks.  Finally, after nobody would accept the Mark, the Reichsbank devalued to a new Rentenmark convertible at 1 trillion to one.  By Nov 1923, circulation had increased 245 billion times and prices 1,380 billion times.  Inflation finally stopped in one day when 4.2 Rentenmarks (4.2 trillion old Marks) exchanged for 1 Dollar, which was convertible into gold.  Germany, via the Dollar, finally went back to the gold standard, after destroying its entire economy in 9 years through hyperinflation of its non-backed paper money. – Dr. H. Hazlitt, Economist

Sound familiar?

Today, in 2012, after FDR dumped the gold standard in 1933 and Nixon cut all dollar ties to gold in 1971, our derivative markets currently exceed a half a quadrillion dollars or $680,000,000,000,000 – six hundred trillion dollars – of non-collateralized paper fueled by America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.  And what is it that everybody is screaming for more of?  The injection of trillions and trillions of more non-collateralized paper money as “liquidity” to “spur” the “growth” of the economy.

--  Sun Feb 26  "Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or the other, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."  --  President James Garfield, 2 weeks before his assassination

--  Thur Feb 23  Who kicked butt at the GOP Presidential debate in Mesa, AZ, Wednesday night?  The left Liberal news media says it was Gov. Mitt Romney.  Why?  Because that's the GOP candidate they want to run against President Obama.  That way, if Obama loses, they get Obama-Lite, you know, a RINO.  RINO: Republican In Name Only, for those of you coming to the party late.  The staunch GOP Republican Establishment will claim that former Sen. Rick Santorum or House Speaker Newt Gingrich won the debate.  Why?  Because Rick and Newt are, or were, part of the GOP Establishment who have been just as guilty as the Democrats over the last 50 years of creating Big Deficits and Big Government.  But if you are a Tea Party or Independent or Fiscal Conservative or Constitutionalist Free Market kind of individual, then you would say Rep Ron Paul came out on top in Wednesday's presidential debate.  Why?  Because he is the only consistently principled presidential candidate who advocates for a limited Republic -- not a Democracy, not a tyranny of the majority -- and a return to the US Constitution as the basic document whose function is to provide the philosophical basis to protect all individuals' inherent rights and freedoms.  In a word, or two, individual liberty.  All the other three candidates simply beat around the bush in Wednesday's debate confessing that, yes, they each voted for lots of state interventionism and big government but now that they are running for the Oval Office, they want to repeal all the Big Government they helped to created.  Right.  Also, while all three claim out of one side of their mouth that they want to cut our $15 trillion dollar national debt, out of the other side of their mouth they put forth programs that would either do nothing or actually increase the deficit.  They all three want to go to war -- not declared by Congress -- against Iran because Iran -- none of them know for sure -- might have a nuclear weapon.  But wars cost hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, and the US is currently more than broke.  None of the Three GOP Amigos -- sans Rep Ron Paul -- truly understand what constitutes sound money or how to re-institute a gold standard.  In this respect, they are worse than the Democrats since at least the Demos openly state they they do not understand a damn thing about money, don't really care, and want to just crank up the monetary printing presses and spend tons more.  Only presidential candidate Ron Paul understands what's wrong with the concept of a Federal Reserve central banking and how to solve that problem with free market economics.  And finally, Ron Paul told the audience last night that while he may not be able to convince them with moral and constitutional arguments -- their fault, not his --why it is not a great idea to go to war with Iran, there is one other parameter that everybody will have to consider whether they want to or not:  namely, the US Dollar is crashing and burning, along with our economy, and we will not be able to continue financing our current level of global military interventionism.  So while the three war hawks running for the presidency may well talk about cutting trillion dollar deficits, they are simultaneously advocating spending trillions of dollars on another costly military adventure.  Only Rep Paul advocates serious talks and negotiations to force Iran to the table to ensure they do not develop a nuke.  Not more foreign aid to the Iranian and other Middle Eastern dictators under the euphemism of "military defense."  Not continuing the Federal Reserve's Petro Dollar Deal to prop up OPEC and the central bankers' bank accounts.  It is the radical Muslim clerics that need to be deposed, not the Iranian people.  Bottom line:  the US and Israel have such a high level of technology these days -- ELFs, directed high energy pulsers, etc. -- that the Iranian Mullahs would not even be able to get a missile off their launching pad before it would be totally destroyed.  Meanwhile, the best foreign affairs tactic should be free market trade with the people of the Middle East.  A higher standard of living including high tech communications and other devices will bring better results than the "Blowback" that always accompanies Big Nations' approaches to try and bribe other countries.  Everybody resents bribes and welfare.  But, like Rome, France, and Great Britain throughout history, this is the US's current and misguided foreign policy and it has blown back into our faces.  Walk softly and carry a big stick, but don't go stomping around in the jungles and deserts of other people's nations.  It doesn't work, never has, and never will.  The three war hawks in the GOP presidential race -- Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich -- are simply posturing for votes by beating the war drums and only Rep Ron Paul seriously understands the Big Picture both for true Defense spending to protect America and free market economics.  Finally, what the news media does not tell everybody is that Rep Ron Paul has garnered the 2nd highest number of delegates required to win the GOP presidential candidacy.  Therefore, at the current rate, if Rep Ron Paul is not in first place at the GOP National Convention in Florida this coming August, he is in a very good position to throw his delegates to whomever he wants to be the winner.  Rep Ron Paul is the man to beat, not Mitt Romney.      

--  Tue Feb 21  Here is a good example of why the US is in a huge debt crisis.  In Obama's zest and zeal to dump the free market and private enterprise and replace it with his lollipop view of fascist economics, the US Dept of Agriculture has recently awarded a $300,000 Value-Added Grant to the Fish Processors of Idaho corporation to market and advertise their product.  That product is:  Leo Ray's Caviar, which retails for about $100 an ounce.  Ray, 74 years old, raises rainbow trout, catfish, tilapia, and 15-year-old white sturgeon, the latter from which he harvests Idaho Caviar.  The problem is not that Mr. Ray is trying to produce Idaho Caviar -- although some connoisseurs may wonder how the hell caviar comes from Idaho.  The problem is that the US taxpayer -- including Mr. Ray's competitors -- are being taxed, i.e. forced, to subsidize Mr. Ray's business.  By what right does the government tax its citizens to provide capital to dole out to businesses chosen by Washington bureaucrats?  Let's say I run a sturgeon fish farm myself in Boise, Idaho, and I went out into the venture capital market to obtain the necessary money that I think it would take to market FM Duck Caviar.  I'm either paying interest on a loan from the venture capitalists or having to give them a share of my possible future profits, or both.  Meanwhile, the government taxes me to provide free Value-Added Grant money -- $300,000 -- to my competitor, Leo's Caviar company.  How fair is that?  And why is the Dept of Agriculture participating in this fascist form of government economics in the first place?  I have nothing personal against Mr. Leo Ray but it doesn't take an Albert Einstein to figure out that if you extend the same concept of Mr. Ray's Value-Added Grant from the government to tens of thousands of other companies in America -- and on a much bigger scale -- then you have essentially destroyed the entire free market and replaced it with a fascist type of economic state.  Welcome to Italy's Benito Mussolini in the 1930s; welcome to Germany's National Socialism of the 1930s; and welcome to the failed USSR experiment in Europe.  While the Idaho Statesman and Twin Falls Times News drooled on and on about how the $300,000 federal grant to Mr. Leo Ray MIGHT help him market his Idaho caviar, nobody connected the economic dots about why this is bad for American economics, the US taxpayer, and explained how this type of government interventionist behavior, incurring a huge national debt, is precisely what has caused our current Greatest Recession since the 1930s.  Never mind the individual rights issues involved.  Tell me, girl friends, who in the banking business is right there, right on time, to finance all of these types of huge taxpayer debts -- often called "freebies," which they are not?  You guessed it:  the central bankers, the Federal Reserve, printing up more and more Monopoly Money, paper debt -- YOUR National Debt, plus interest -- like there's no tomorrow.  And at their current rate of hyper-inflation, there will be no "tomorrow" -- especially for the poor and middle classes throughout the world.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Meanwhile, the socialist news media, fascist President Barack Obama, and all their little government pundits cleverly blame our $100 Trillion Unfunded National Debt and Recession on "capitalism," while actually it is the direct result of continual state interventionism:  the very type of economic system that our not-so sage President is trying to foist down our throats today.  How do you stop it?  Simple.  Just return to a sound monetary system.  Has anybody ever thought about gold?

--  Mon Feb 20  Watch this video of a Canadian TV talk show host as he blasts President Obama on Obama's veto of the Keystone Oil Project.  (click here)

--  Sun Feb 19  So far, three of the four GOP presidential candidates for 2012 have showed up to Boise, Idaho to speak to Idahonians (new word) before the March 6 GOP Primary Caucus.  Sen. Rick Santorum drew about 2,000 attendees at Capital High School; Gov. Mitt Romney of Taxachusetts, pulled in about 1,200 Obama-Lite War Hawks plus a handful of rich GOP Old Schoolers at $2,500 a pop dinner (I hope that Lobster Thermidor, Boef d' Filet and 1963 Private Reserve Cab were worth it); and Rep Ron Paul spoke to 2,500 to 3,000 Tea Party types yesterday at the Boise Centre on the Grove.  Ex Speaker of the US House Newt Gingrich is, so far, a no-show.  The reason all these GOP presidential candidates are showing up to Idaho this year -- as opposed to never showing up in past years -- is because the Spud State has 32 delegates up for grabs in what may well turn out to be a close election.  No presidential candidates ever showed up in the past because the Idaho Primaries were held in late May or early June and the entire nation already knew who won the GOP candidacy by the time the Idaho Primaries even got started.  If you want to vote in the Idaho 2012 GOP Caucus next March 6th, you can register at the door.  Place:  BSU Taco Bell Arena.  Doors Open:  4 pm - 7 pm.  If you are standing in line at 7 pm, you can get into the Caucus.  Otherwise you are Out of Luck.  Note that the GOP Caucus is only for the presidency.  All of the other elected officials for Idaho will run in a regular Idaho Primary on May 15.  Be there or be square.  The Idaho Caucus in Ada County is slated to be the largest caucus ever in the US.

--  Fri Feb 17  As we approach the 2012 presidential elections, the biggest difference between the President's Democratic Party and the candidates for the Republican Party is:  the Democrats are simply busy little socialists arguing about how best to divide up everybody's personal and private property, while the Republicans are all stating that it is unconstitutional and against the Inherent Natural Rights of Man to divide up the fruits of anybody's mind and labor.  Private property rights and individual freedom are not terms that exist in the vocabulary of the Democratic Party.  Everything is group, group, group, we, we, we.  It's as if Democrats have taken a 250 year Great Leap Backwards in cultural and moral philosophy.  Back to the Dark Ages.  If they don't wake up soon, we are going to have to go through the entire Age of Enlightenment all over again because at least 50% of the US population didn't get it the first time around.  And Europeans never did get it.  Nor did any nations on any other continent either.

--  Tue Valentine's Day  After failing in his bid to encourage the Catholic Church and affiliates who hire employees to agree to pay for contraceptives and abortions in His nationalized health care plan, the President has now performed a quantum leap by saying that the Catholic Church's insurance company will pay for said contraceptives and abortions.  Does President Obama really think we are that stupid?  Yes, he does.  That's like saying the federal government can or should force automobile insurance companies to pay for our car insurance, thus relieving us of that personal responsibility.  At a simpler economic level, that's like pretending that when you tax corporations, they don't pass that expense along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.  Right.  Why are socialists always so stupid about basic finances and economics?  Well, that's one of the character traits of the type of people who tend toward becoming left Liberal Progressives:  stupid about basic finances and economics.  Duh.  Even successful businessmen such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet -- good Liberals that they are -- may know how to run their businesses in their particular sector of the economy, but God help us if either one of these two businessmen were asked what the basic requirements would be to establish a free and open market, because they really don't know.  If these two businessmen were asked to function in the type of left Liberal market that they would create with socialist President Obama, they would fail, just like every business trying to operate under any socialist government.  Happy Valentine's Day, President Obama.  And may the Bird of Paradise squat on your national health care joke.

--  Thur Feb 09  Has anybody checked the US Debt Clock projections lately?  Well, I have, since we carry it on this Web Site (click on the Puddy Tat chasing the Franklin immediately to the right of this column).  And, holy moley, what a surprise-a-roono!  Not.  The Debt Clock figures show that at the current rate of spending by President Obama, and Congress and their Federal Reserve money pumpers, our US Indebtedness by the year 2016 will be a whopping $1.5 Quadrillion Dollars!  In 4 short years, the National Debt will be $24 Trillion, $74,000 indebtedness for each citizen, $197,000 indebtedness for each taxpayer.  The total interest on the National Debt -- the interest paid to the central bankers who created this mess -- will be $4.8 Trillion.  Ain't they smart?  The total Unfunded Indebtedness will be $143 Trillion (thank you, both political parties):  $19 Trillion for Social Security (thank you President FDR), $26 Trillion for Prescription Drugs (thank you, President George Bush), and $99 Trillion for Medicare (thank you, President Lyndon Johnson).  All of this debt will be financed with pulp fiction Monopoly Money -- plus B & O Railroad and Marvin Gardens -- and a GDP of $17 Trillion Dollars in 2016.  That means if you took 8 times the total amount of everybody's property, capital, savings, and lollipops in the US and sold it to China in a Big Flea Market in Shanghai in 2016, you still couldn't pay off the $143 Trillion Debt, never mind having a nickel left over for an all day sucker -- the only commodity left on our grocery shelves.  Yeah, girl friends, that's how we should balance our budget.  Confiscate everybody's property.  Tax the rich; tax the poor.  Uh-huh.  And the Federal Reserve will make $1.3 Quadrillion on their Credit Default Swaps betting against the US economy recovering.  Wow, what a sweet deal for the Keynesian Economic bankers.

--  Tue Feb 07  Well yippee and yahoo, girl friends.  Shut up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  President Obama and His Czsocialist Czars are lying to us again, claiming that the unemployment rate is dropping like a rock on Jupiter and the economy is picking up.  Whoo-hoo!  The truth is, 1.2 million people, in one month, dropped out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics work force and said, "The hell with it, I'm not even bothering to look for a job anymore because there aren't any jobs out there."  This means that the labor force participation rate has dropped to its lowest level in over 30 years!  1.2 million people stopped looking for a job in one month.  At this rate, the unemployment rate will soon dive bomb to zero because there is no work force except government jobs.  How does that work?  All the government workers go to work, produce nothing, and then tax themselves with fake paper money to pay for their own jobs?  Ooooh.  Brilliant.  Like how long can that last?  Don't even ask about a government pension.  It won't be there.  Unless you count Monopoly Money from Parker Brothers.  Meanwhile, Obama and his socialists are shouting from the Oval Office (OO) roof top, "Hoo boy, lookie lookie at the unemployment rate.  It's dropping.  Must be because everybody getting a good job in the market, right Michelle?"  Uh-huh.  You betchum, Lone Ranger.  More like everybody has given up and how's that new Obama best-selling book coming along:  How To Lie With Statistics?

--  Thur Feb 02  Obama is in boiling water with the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church hires people to work for it.  Obama's nationalized health care program -- ObamaCare -- mandates that everybody in the nation can receive federal money for abortions and that all employers must pay into said system.  This is tantamount to forcing Catholic workers and employers to finance what Catholics consider an immoral act.  So what was President Barack Obama's response to Catholics?  Well, uh, you see, we uh, you know, like uh, how about if the Catholic Church just hangs out and chills for about a year and we'll see if you guys change your minds, OK?  No, said all the outraged Catholics and the Church.  It's not OK.  This is not something we have to think about for a year or another minute.  It's wrong, it's immoral, and we want (1) this provision taken out of ObamaCare, or (2) ObamaCare totally dismantled, period.  For those of you who may not agree that abortion per se is immoral -- let's say, at least before the spark of life enters the fetus after 21 days after conception -- how about rejecting ObamaCare on the concept that NOBODY should be forced by the government -- federal or state (are you listening, Taxachussetts candidate Mitt Romney?) -- to purchase any commodity or service in the market.  Why?  Because it violates many individual's moral convictions of inherent freedom and private property rights to one's own mind and body.  Abortion is just one subset of the bigger moral philosophical concept:  individual rights, which includes religious freedom.  Obama and his fascist national health care program has definitely crossed the moral line on more than just the issue of abortion.  If you believe a woman has the right to an abortion before 21 days after conception, then decide with your own doctor and go pay for it yourself.  Don't ask me to finance your abortions through the government -- or your contraceptives, or school lunches, or mortgages, or anything else I didn't sign up for.

--  Tue Jan 31  Ah yes, government banks, subsidized by the taxpayers.  What are they up to these days in, say, Britain?  Not much different than what they're up to here in The Colonies.  RBS Bank, one of the largest banks in England, 83% owned by the British taxpayers, is passing out 50 Million Pounds in bonuses to five of its top bank managers while RBS stocks crashed on the good news, costing the share holders another 500 Million Pounds in lost value.  Meanwhile, at  # 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Cameron scolded the bad boyz of banker street and slapped them on their wrists.  Naughty, naughty, bolstering your million Pound salaries and million shares of freebie stocks with huge bonuses for doing nothing but losing money over the last year.  And it's not even your money, you lousy gangsta bankstas; it's the people's money, stolen from them at the point of a printing press by the British government.  And that's how banking works today, folks.  Fake paper money not backed by anything except the promises by government that future taxpayers will pick up the deficit from their taxpaying children who will then pick up an even bigger deficit from their taxpaying grandchildren who will then... hey it never ends until the entire Ponzi Scheme of Pulp Fiction Pounds (or Pulp Fiction Dollars in the US) comes tumbling down around everybody's ears.  That's what happens after a nation goes off the gold standard.  Gold money represents stored savings, seed corn, capital.  Paper money not backed by anything represents not stored savings or capital but rather it is merely an IOU on YOUR future production.  That's right, mes amies, paper deficits are not IOUs by the government or even the consumer.  Paper deficits are IOUs on future goods and services that the government HOPES you will produce as the very same government throws economic roadblocks all over the business highway to prohibit you from producing anything.  We now live in a value-less society where even our money -- or rather especially our money, the lifeblood of modern economic exchange -- has been purposely stripped of its value by counterfeiting umpteen zillion tons of it and throwing it out into the welfare state.  No wonder our paper money is worthless.  In the end, monetary inflation will destroy the bankers and politicians, too.  You can't fool Mother Nature, or the Law of Identity, or the Law of Cause and Effect.  Pretending that paper has value due to the sheer act of printing it off a government printing press is about as disillusioned as one can get.  RBS gangsta bankstas, enjoy your newly printed paper Pounds before they devalue lower than whale poop at the bottom of the English Channel.

--  Sun Jan 29  Jump off your ponies, pull up the barn floor, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java and shut up, girl friends.  Let's talk polls.  Specifically, voting polls.  Every day we are bombarded on TV with multiple polls purporting to tell us which presidential candidate is leading in votes if the 2012 election was held today.  We have CNN Polls, MSNBC Polls, CNBC Polls, Fox News Polls, Rasmussen Polls, and Whoop-tee-doo Whatever Polls, the purpose of which is to... well, to do what?  What, exactly, is the real function of a poll on voting if not to influence future voters on whom to vote for?  A voting poll is not taken to inform you about news.  A voting poll is not an attempt to scientifically make a quantum leap about who is going to win so that we can skip the official upcoming election and declare the winner by the results of, for example, the latest Rasmussen Poll.  Why tell the TV audience who is "ahead" or "behind" in the voting polls unless it is to affect the outcome by this sneaky little method camouflaged as objective news?  More importantly, it behooves us to understand that this method of attempting to influence the voter by what (and how many) other voters think is the result of collectivist thinking (collectivist philosophy).  That is, you the voter are slyly being encouraged to vote according to how the majority crowd votes, not by thinking about the ideas or issues put forth by the candidates and coming to a conclusion based upon your own logic and reasoning.  This collectivist thinking has now become embedded in our culture.  It can best be illustrated by what is now referred to as "Social Networking."  Note that the major Social Networking software dominating the Internet today is Face Book and the first thing that Face Book asks the user to click on is "Like" (thumbs up) or "Dislike" (thumbs down) on everybody else's comments or postings.  Social Networking that posts the total votes of Likes/Dislikes on Face Book, Twitter, iPod, Droid, Razr, Blazer or whatever cell phones, and all the other means of communication by the youth of today, is meant to inform you of what the current majority thinks about some issue in order to encourage the reader to "correctly" click (i.e., vote Like or Dislike) his/her vote to conform with the majority, the Mob, the Collective.  There is no other reason for Face Book to keep track of -- and show the number of -- Likes and Dislikes for every person's comments and postings except to make sure the individual knows where they stand in relation to The Mob's current votes.  Why is this important to The Collective, The Mob, The Group, The Tribe?  Because the predominant culture of today is not to think by using step by step logic and objective reasoning about whatever issue is being discussed; the culture of today has devolved back to the level of declaring that reality is whatever The Majority Group says it is.  If the majority or "consensus" of The Group says such and such is true -- totally ignoring that a choo-choo train speeding down the tracks on which you are walking is dangerous and is not just a benign yo-yo, so don't worry about it -- then one is supposed to substitute Democratic Majority Rule for an individual's reasoning to discover objective reality.  Why is it important to know this difference?  Because the former (Majority Rule) is an attempt at philosophical refutation of the Law of Identity, the axiomatic primary for survival of human beings qua an individual that ensures they(he) recognize(s) and understand(s) objective reality.  Metaphysical philosophy (the fundamental given, the Law of Identity) of the individual is important.  It is the basis of your thinking process.  It is the basis for your epistemology (your mode of rational thinking), which leads to your moral epistemology (assigning the "good" and "bad" so you can "value" issues and ideas), which leads to your political philosophy so you can choose which social-political-economic directions to embrace, and finally esthetics, art, which allows you to "refuel" and concretely experience your self-esteem as per the entire range of philosophy that you hold.  Note that the same youth culture of collectivist voting -- such as Like/Dislike on Face Book -- is the same youth culture that embraces music and video which is discordant cacophony (noise), violent movies and games, violent sports, skull and cross bone logos on T-shirts, and death -- especially suicidal death -- as empirical ideals to aspire to.  Listen to the words of today's pop music.  It is not accidental that the end result of suicide is the result of the epistemology that holds the individual self as worthless and establishes the moral creed that selfless sacrifice of the individual to the collective state (or religion, e.g. Middle East) is the highest moral value that one can achieve.  Anything done for yourself is bad; anything done for others -- especially for The Group, The Tribe, The Race, The Mob, The Collective -- is supposedly the ultimate moral good.  Altruism for others as a duty (not to be confused with voluntary kindness) is regarded as good; individual selfishness (even though not harming others) is regarded as bad.  Therefore, for the individual to strive for pleasure or happiness is regarded in the state collectivist mind as bad.  This is an attempt to discourage the individual from using his mind to discover objective reality by which he can then make logical identity decisions for survival.  One is supposed to depend on majority "consensus" answers from The Collective -- the Biggest Gang currently in control -- in order to decide what to do and how to survive.  Denying the means -- your brain -- to discover objective reality and knocking yourself off for The Group is regarded as one's highest virtue.  But the philosophy of self-immolation -- whether in society, politics or economics -- must inexorably lead to suicide.  (Ironically, for the individual AND the group.)  If the majority walks over the cliff, you're supposed to walk over the cliff, too, because The Group said so.  Back to the initial issue of the real purpose of voting polls.  The purpose of today's continual bombardment of voting polls on every channel on TV is to influence your vote for whichever Mob or Tribe or Political Gang is currently leading in the polls.  They want you to know the numbers every minute of every day so you can jettison your mind and go along with The Group.  If you don't go along with The Group, you are guilty of thinking for yourself and going against The Group, and we all know that objective reality is whatever The Mob says it is (welcome to The Hive).  The Collectivist mind -- especially the altruistic mind -- "feels" (since they're not thinking) that the Law of Identity and five major levels of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, aesthetics plus the Law of Cause and Effect can all be disregarded and replaced with simple economic sophisms and disconnected thought globs.  Not.

--  Sat Jan 28  Watch the Petro Dollar Agreement slowly crash and burn.  The Petro Dollar Agreement was an agreement by the OPEC oil ministers and the Federal Reserve that stipulated oil purchases from OPEC Middle East countries could only be purchased using US Dollars.  That ensured the Feds would earn lots of interest as all nations would have to "buy" dollars (in exchange for their own currency) to use as an international currency to buy monopoly oil from OPEC.  Now, however, in today's central banking-created global mess, many nations are beginning to do two things:  (1) purchase OPEC oil using their own currency, or (2) fall back to using gold as the international currency to buy oil -- and other commodities.  The Federal Reserve is getting its little pulp fiction dollar ass kicked from here to Kingdom Come, whichever kingdom you may be talking about.  Further, according to The Economic Times, "In an 'exclusive report' on Jan 23, the website, debka.com, quoted Iranian sources as saying that 'India is the first buyer of Iranian oil to agree to pay for its purchases in gold instead of US dollars'.  The report, which went online soon after an Indian official team visited Iran last week, also claimed that China may follow suit, noting that India and China buy about one million barrels a day from Iran, which amounts to 40 per cent of that nation's total exports of 2.5 million barrels per day.  'By trading in gold, New Delhi and Beijing enable Tehran to bypass the upcoming freeze on its central bank's assets and the oil embargo which the European Union's foreign ministers agreed to impose Jan 23,' it claimed."  The Federal Reserve has been a busy bunch of little boys and girls as they (1) continue to hyper-inflate the crap out of the US Pulp Fiction Dollar to "stimulate" ha ha "stimulate" the US economy, (2) issue the US Dollar as currency swaps to Europe to try and bail out the Euro, and (3) deal with the declining use of their Petro Dollar as the monopoly money for OPEC's monopoly oil.  Three cartels -- the Federal Reserve, OPEC, and the US Government/Military Industrial Complex (misusing our great military men and women to illegally protect the Petro Dollar Deal) -- have been cavorting around in a financial ménage a trois for decades now and it's time for their nasty games to come to an abrupt halt.  As in yesterday, if not sooner.  Looks like we're coming full circle, back to gold.  Note that an international gold standard would have automatically prevented all of the three cartels' misdeeds -- and a whole lot more.  And that's why, girl friends, they took us off the gold standard and invented Keynesian Stupid Economics for all the little twits at Harvard and other "higher" institutes of low level learning.  If the average individual understood, truly understood, what monetary inflation really is, they would be rioting in the streets today.

--  Thur Jan 26  The problem with Economic Village Idiots like President Barack Obama is not with him per se.  There have always been intellectually stupid politicians of the state collectivist ilk who have run for office and won.  Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, Adolph Hitler, national socialist dictator of Germany, Fidel Castro, communist dictator of Cuba, the list is long.  No, girl friends, it is not the fault of the dictators that they keep getting elected.  It is the fault of the people, the intellectual level of the culture that voted for them that is the real problem.  Obama, like Mussolini, Hitler, and Lenin didn't just pop up out of nowhere and take over a country.  The people handed it to them on a silver platter.  True, it is easier to predict that somebody will become a dictator AFTER they have exterminated thousands or millions of their countrymen in gas chambers and firing squads and US President Barack Obama has just begun on his dictatorial journey with all of his socialist policies.  The problem is that too many people are incapable of EXTRAPOLATING the end results of socialist, communist, fascist, and other state collectivist policies UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.  Then it's called history, clearly visibile to even an idiot.  The real problem with people not being able to logically reason and thus forecast that socialist policies must necessarily end up as either stagnant economies that go nowhere or, in worst case scenarios, a gas chamber, is that AFTER THE FACT is waaaay too late.  All of the "I told you so's," and, "Gee whizzers, I didn't know he was really using gas chambers," after WW II were way too late.  If the President of the United States is not advocating inherent individual rights, private property, the return to a limited federal Republic under the rule of law instead of the rule of man, that's a Big Clue and you should be very afraid.  Why?  Because that means he is advocating a dictatorial position for himself and a subservient position for you.  As in slavery.  Note in the President's State of the Union speech the other night that he is asking Congress to grant him the authority to consolidate essentially all of the federal bureaucracies under his Executive Branch so he can act more rapidly.  Nothing like a dictator wanting to be able to act "more rapidly."  Uh huh.  This is indicative of his aspiration to become a state collectivist dictator, just like Mussolini started out, just like Hitler started out, just like Lenin started out, and we all know what happened in the End Game of those regimes.  Consolidating federal control in the Executive Branch of government is the exact anti-thesis of how and why the US Constitution was formulated.  You don't even have to pore over the Federalist Papers to figure this out.  Government is supposed to be LIMITED and SLOW on purpose.  That's OK since government is not supposed to be so big and so all encompassing that it bogs down the nation's economy because it is not supposed to be participating in the economy in the first place.  This is not a flaw in a constitutional republic whose foundations are based upon inherent rights of the people, rights obtained from Nature or God.  The reason that all dictators hate limited Republics is because it impedes the implementation of their dictatorship.  Make no mistake about it:  President Barack Obama's "good intentions" for you consist of making you a ward of His Socialist Welfare State.  First he must obtain the sanction of his victims, you.  He did that in 2008.  Next, he must make you feel guilty if you don't acquiesce to his ideas of socialist economic sophistries.  Welcome to ObamaCare.  The only way you can stop him now is by voting his butt out in 2012.  It is not Obama that I am worried about.  He's obviously the Economic Village Idiot.  It's the current culture of altruistic collectivism that has taken over our entire nationalized public education system that is frightening.  Because it has produced people who can't think, never mind don't think.  Students have not been taught how to think in categories of step by step logic using reason.  Instead they have been taught to think in terms of disconnected illogical thought globs.  The government school system has rendered an entire generation of youth intellectually impotent.  That is what one needs to be worried about, not Obama the socialist dictator.  He's just another actor on the stage, reading socialist claptrap from a Hollywood teleprompter.  If Americans don't wake up, they may soon learn how socialist ideas are empirically transformed into socialist Holocausts in the End Game with people screaming, "Holy crap, I sure didn't see that coming!"  No shit, little Beaver.  One who does not think in clearly defined terms will literally not "see" any of it coming.  If you didn't "see" what Obama really wanted in between the lines of his State of His Fascist Union speech last Tuesday night, you really don't "see" it coming, do you?  Don't wait until the government monitors your emails, tattoos a number on your arm, makes you post a Star on your shop window, herds you into a ghetto (many blacks are already there, lured by ADC and food stamp programs), and finally, while you're taking off your clothes in the government's fake shower, do you then -- finally -- "see" it coming.

--  Fri Jan 20  Whoa, girl friends, T-Bills are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government?  Wowie-zowie, except for one thing.  T-Bills are now selling for negative interest rates.  That's right, Martha.  The latest $10 billion auction is US inflation-adjustable T-Bills called TIPS, which incur a 0.046% interest rate cost to YOU, the buyer.  You could still possibly make money because the principal in TIPS bonds could increase as inflation increases.  So now the US government is selling adjustable rate T-Bills, charging you a fee, because the Feds know that they are going to continue hyper-inflating our money supply.  Things have really gotten out of hand in the financial community these days.  What's next?  Maybe the local bank will start charging you a fee for depositing your savings into a CD by promising to increase your principal by some inflation rate formula.  Then you have to pray that inflation continues so you can beat the negative interest rate they're charging you to open up a savings account or CD.  What a joke.

--  Thur Jan 19  President Barack Obama said "no" to the issuing of a permit to build an oil pipeline from Canada across the US to Mexico.  The Greenies who think they are protecting the environment cheered.  So did the EPA.  The oil companies and pipeline workers booed.  Of course, there are better, cleaner sources of infinite energy that we could tap from the "vacuum" of the space time continuum -- see www.energenx.com  or www.r-charge.com -- but the real question here is:  why in hell do we have to ask the President of the United States whether we can build an oil pipeline?  Better yet, how in hell did the President of the United States presume the position of Economic Dictator of America?  Of course, oil companies can't just run amuck building anything they want across any state in the Union but shouldn't that be a decision for local state governments and their residents, not the President of the US?  Nobody has questioned the President's authority, but they should.  From where did Obama obtain his new Economic Authority?  Everybody presumes the President is the CEO of America, so they only argue about The CEO's illegal decision of "yes" or "no," not whether he has the authority to issue or withhold economic permits.  The US has now devolved from a limited Republic with free market capitalism and the rule of law to the level of a 1930's fascist Italy during which IL Deuce, Mussolini, dictated the price of every service and commodity in that nation.  And then along came Adolph, who did the same thing in Germany.  And the USSR.  And China.  And..., hey, welcome to the New United States of America where whoever happens to be the head honcho of the current biggest tribal collective, rules the land.  The pipeline issue is not about the environment.  It is about philosophy.  It is about the philosophical difference between the rule of law vs. the rule of man.  The rule of law is gone, along with your inherent individual freedom and private property rights.  Welcome to the rule of the Collective, the Mob, the Borg.

--  Tue Jan 17  The GOP presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last night fell to a new low when Rep Ron Paul tried to explain why the US should stop its continual warmongering all across the globe and virtually none of the other GOP candidates or audience understood what he was talking about.  In fact, they boo-ed him.  Nobody is asking the right question, which is, Who initiated the use of force and fraud in the Middle East that has now resulted in (1) the hatred of America by Third World nations in general, (2) the bombings of our embassies throughout the world and the two World Trade Centers in New York, and (3) the continual undeclared wars going on in the Middle East?  The answer is that it was the central bankers of America and the OPEC oil cartel who set up the Petro Dollar Deal in which (1) the OPEC oil ministers would get a monopoly on selling oil in the world, (2) the OPEC oil ministers can only sell oil in dollars -- no other currencies, hence the term "Petro Dollar", and (3) the United States Federal Reserve in league with other global central bankers would use the US military to protect this God awful PETRO  DOLLAR deal.  That is what Rep Ron Paul is talking about when he says that we, the United States, through a GSE (The Federal Reserve) and the illegal use of our military power to "protect" the Petro Dollar OPEC monopoly (Congress has not declared war upon any nation in the Middle East) are guilty of initiating the use of both force and fraud in this 50-75 year Middle East debacle.  But since most Americans have not been told the truth, they only look at the partial results of our actions -- the bombings of the two World Trade Centers in New York.  They then conclude that US-Middle East history and foreign affairs started on 9/11/2001 and that the US is only responding in self defense -- what I would call a faux self defense -- by bombing the crap out of various peoples in the Middle East as retribution for the 3,000 Trade Center deaths in New York.  The Trade Center airplane crash bombings were a response by the OPEC ministers' rich children, 17 disgruntled Saudi Arabian rich kids whose Daddies ARE the House of Saud.  The US has been FOR Osama bin Laden and then AGAINST him for many years.  Remember, the US supplied Osama bin Laden with most of his military equipment as we openly supported him and his motley crew in fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  Talk about short-sighted and revisionist history on the part of all the US war hawks running for the 2012 US presidency.  They either pretend, or fail to see, how the US central bankers started this entire debacle with their Petrol Dollar Deal with OPEC.  Rep Ron Paul is telling the truth and -- like others before him who tried to tell the truth -- will probably lose his bid for the presidency of the United States because ignorant Americans have fallen for the same central banking cartel fairytale about who initiated the wars in the Middle East and who initiated the hyperinflation and continual debasement of our currency at home:  not us, the central bankers, they claim.  Note how each of the candidates other than Rep Ron Paul vociferously played to the Myrtle Beach audience as they howled like wolves to, "Kill, kill, kill" undefined terrorists in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.  And, by the way, whatever happened to that CIA whistle blower who recently wrote a book claiming we did not need to declare war on Iraq because they had already offered to end any "problems" there, and further, that she -- the CIA lady -- had information that the US secret service (or somebody resembling them) helped the World Trade Centers come crashing down with a clever placement of explosives at key points on the building?  She went to jail for a year for her revelations but the question is:  where is she now and where is her book?  Back to the scene of the S.C. presidential debates.  Every GOP candidate is gung ho for war, even though Rep Ron Paul clearly explained the difference between creating a strong pro-defense policy vs. blowing trillions of dollars every year on the central bankers backing of the Military Industrial Complex.  Once again, it is the low level of intellectual understanding of the other presidential candidates (and the audience) about concepts such as "real money" and "true free market economics" that distinguishes the difference between candidate Ron Paul and the rest of the howling GOP pack.  It seems we have turned into a nation of Spartans, ready to conquer the entire world based upon false premises and half truths.

--  Sun Jan 08, 2012... Best in 2011, Tue Sep 06  Pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, shut up, and listen (from Doug Casey at Casey Gold Reports):

Q:  Is there any way to stop this economic train wreck from occurring?

A: "Right now the US Government is spending over a trillion and a half dollars more than they are taking in – but that's as good as it's going to get. We're already in the best of all possible worlds, considering what's happened. It gets vastly worse from here. As unemployment and business failures start going up, the government's deficit will rise to $2 trillion per year. They talked about cutting $2 or $3 or $4 trillion, but that's over 10 years and it's loaded towards the end of the 10 years; their supposed cuts are inconsequential, trivial, and meaningless. In addition, there's no reason to believe that spending won't skyrocket from here, because Congress is going to change next year, and again two years after that. They'll all have new cockamamie spending ideas. So this is all a complete charade.

To answer the question, the only ultimate cure for this is that interest rates go back up to the 12 or 14% level, which would reward prudent savers and punish borrowers. But that's just a start. Military spending should be cut 90%, with the closure of all foreign bases, covert operations, and aid. Regulatory agencies like the SEC, the FDA, HUD, USDA, DOE, OSHA, FAA, EPA, etc., etc. should be abolished. The Fed should be abolished and gold reinstituted as money. The national debt should be overtly defaulted on for numerous reasons, but certainly because it acts as a mortgage on future generations. But none of that's going to happen, rather the opposite. These prescriptions, while economically and morally correct, are a complete political pipe dream.

A big part of the problem is that people have been consuming more than they have been producing. So the way to get the economy back on track is for people to produce more than they consume and save the difference. High interest rates encourage that. But the government is opposed to high interest rates, partly because it runs counter to Keynesian theory and partly because it would greatly accelerate the bankruptcy of the government.

Let's say interest rates go from the 2% level they are now to a 12% level. That's going to mean that interest payments on the whole national debt – which has basically been financed short term and has to be rolled over annually – will go from say $300 billion per year (2% of $15 trillion) to $1.8 trillion per year. The deficit, therefore, must increase by another $1.5 trillion dollars a year if you do the single most important thing to slow down this train wreck.

So, I think they have actually gone beyond the point of no return. There's no way to avoid a genuine catastrophe, much worse than what happened in the 1930s. There are several ways this could end, but I suspect the government will choose the worst alternative. I suspect the destruction of the US dollar is in their minds. How are we going to get rid of all this debt? Well, destroying the US dollar is the only way. Their first priority is saving the US Government.

But they're not considering that the people who will be hurt the worst are the prudent people, people who have saved dollars. They will destroy the prudent parts of society that actually try to produce more than they consume and save the difference. Prudent middle class workers are going to be wiped out, and the people who borrow and are deeply in debt are going to be rewarded by having their debt wiped out. That's perverse. It is going to wipe out the middle class in the US and all over the world. Everywhere in the world, people have preferred to save in US dollars where they can, and those people are going to be wiped out. Perhaps even worse, it's going to put the US government temporarily back on a manageable financial basis. That means they won't have to fire all their employees or disband all these agencies and get rid of the military, which is what should be done. They'll wind up destroying the productive parts of the economy to save the government; the parasite will kill the host. It's a total disaster, with wide-ranging consequences, and it's going to happen in this decade." -- Doug Casey, Casey Gold Reports

U of Idaho Wallace pleads GUILTY in $136 mil University Place fiasco...

25% Off Boise's Watergate book
available @ Random House Xlibris Bookstore
Soft Cover Was $20.99 Now $15.99
Hard Cover Was $30.99 Now $22.99

Deep Throat, Deep Throat II, Deepest Throat...how many damn Deep Throats are there in Idaho anyway?

About the author...I was born at the Alamo.  Then we moved to Japan.  Then to California, where I learned the dirty bop.  Attended UC Berkeley.  Got drafted into the Army.  Worked for the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, in the Pentagon and Saigon, Vietnam...in a steel vault two feet thick with cipher locks.  Top Secret Crypto Eyes Only security clearance.  Cranked up four corporations.  Managed Pacific Northwest branch of  a NY Software Company.  Moved to Boise, Idaho.  I'm an investigative journalist writing under a fake name.  Nobody would name their kid "Deep."  And no, my last name is not "Throat."  I dig up dirty laundry.  Dirty political laundry.  On the QT.  Hush-hush.  It's a dirty job, long hours and the pay stinks.  But it's a living and there's lots of dirty political laundry in Idaho.  I lean over a lot of fences, drink a lot of Rocket Java, and listen through beer mugs pressed against bathroom walls.  Right now I'm on my way down to check out another dead body at the Idaho State Legislature.  I better be careful...or it might be my own. -- Deep Throat II   Contact author

What they're saying about

Boise's Watergate:

"Of course it was a fix.  It's an incestuous mess." -- Senator Stan Hawkins (R-Ucon), 18-year veteran legislator who voted NO on the University Place fiasco

"You are on the right track.  But you need deeper background.  I have it.  I know where every skeleton is buried.  But I need deepest cover.  You cannot reveal anything about me, not even where or how or by what means you obtain info from me.  Zip, zilch, zero, nada.  You must protect this source even if a judge threatens to send you to jail for contempt." -- Deepest Throat, anonymous source

"Finally, someone with the brains and guts enough to connect the dots between the $100 million Ada County Court House scam and the $136 million University Place fiasco as one big crime spree against the taxpayers by the Boise lawyers, politicians, and Cryptic Partners.  A fast read, this book deserves to become a best seller." -- Sharon Ullman, Ada County Commissioner (2001-2003, 2009-2012)

     Table of Contents    

Chapter  1 - The Cookie Monsters
Chapter  2 - All The Governor's Men
Chapter  3 - Cryptic Partners
Chapter  4 - Shark Frenzy:  Give-Us-Your-Purses
Chapter  5 - Holy Eureka, It's "Hoover Time!"
Chapter  6 - UI and UIF Cookie Jars
Chapter  7 - Nolo Conflicto?
Chapter  8 - Governor's Legislative Dog & Pony Show
Chapter  9 - Boise's Watergate
Chapter 10 - ISBA Throws Monkey Wrench at UIF
Chapter 11 - UIF fires Cryptic Partners for $18 mil? 
                    Excuuse Me?
Chapter 12 - Whistle Blower Winstead
Chapter 13 - Follow The Money
Chapter 14 - "Absolute Power Corrupts"

-------------

Green?
 Did somebody
 say Green?

   Drive the
 ultimate in Green cars.
  Drive the all-electric Tesla sports car.  Zero emissions, zero fossil fuels, and zero carbon footprint.  Well, as close to zero as you can get.  0 to 60 in 4 sec flat.  Beats the crap out of  Corvette, Ferrari, Porsche,  Testaroonie-whatevers and the space shuttle.  Go Green.  Vrooooommmm... off in a cloud of, well, electrons...

-------------

Breaking the
Demopublican Monopoly
How to Unify the Political Right with a Third Party that Can Win

By Nelson Hultberg

New Revised Edition, 112 pgs., $11.95

   We are taught in school that the strength of the American political system lies in the fact that we have a "two-party process." This is akin to teaching that babies come from storks. It is a fairy tale we spin out to avoid messy details of reality we prefer not to face.

   The reality is that America is now a one-party state. The Democratic and Republican parties have become nothing but two divisions of the same party -- the Central Leviathan Party. No matter who wins, we always get more spending, more taxes, more inflation, more bureaucracies, more wars, and LESS FREEDOM.

    Previous National News   

China is Bankrupt

(Nov 18, 2011)

Pull up the barn floor, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java and listen up, girl friends:  China is bankrupt.  That's right.  According to Matthew Robertson of the Epoch Times, the same China that the US news media keeps babbling about as the epitome of whoop-tee-doo Shanghai capitalism, free markets, and blah blah baloney is running off their high speed railroad tracks and right over the financial cliff.  Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the Commie regime is in serious economic straits and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.  Every province in China, he said, is a debt-ridden Greece, ready to financially explode.  Lang’s assessment that the regime is bankrupt was based on five conjectures:

First, the regime’s debt sits at about 36 trillion yuan (US$5.68 trillion). This calculation is arrived at by adding up Chinese local government debt (between 16 trillion and 19.5 trillion yuan, or US$2.5 trillion and US$3 trillion), and the debt owed by state-owned enterprises (another 16 trillion, he said). But with interest of two trillion per year, he thinks things will unravel quickly.

Second, the regime’s officially published inflation rate of 6.2 percent is fabricated. The real inflation rate is 16 percent, according to Lang.

Third, there is serious excess capacity in the economy, and that private consumption is only 30 percent of economic activity. Lang said that beginning this July, the Purchasing Managers Index, a measure of the manufacturing industry, plunged to a new low of 50.7. This is an indication, in his view, that China’s economy is in recession.

Fourth, the regime’s officially published GDP of 9 percent is also fabricated. According to Lang’s data, China’s GDP has decreased 10 percent. He said that the bloated figures come from the dramatic increase in infrastructure construction, including real estate development, railways, and highways each year (accounting for up to 70 percent of GDP in 2010).

Fifth, taxes are too high. Last year, the taxes on Chinese businesses (including direct and indirect taxes) were at 70 percent of earnings. The individual tax rate sits at 81.6 percent, Lang said.

Once the “economic tsunami” starts, the regime will lose credibility and China will become the poorest country in the world, Lang said.

Several commentators have expressed broad agreement with Lang’s analysis.

Professor Frank Xie at the University of South Carolina, Aiken, said that the idea of China going bankrupt isn't far fetched.  Major construction projects -- such as Ghost Malls where no one shops and high speed trains to nowhere -- have helped inflate the GDP, he says. “On the surface, it is a big number, but inflation is even higher. So in reality, China’s economy is in recession.”

Further, Xie said that official figures shouldn’t be relied on. The regime’s vice premier, Li Keqiang for example, admitted to a U.S. diplomat that he doesn’t believe the statistics produced by lower-level officials, and when he was the governor of Liaoning Province “had to personally see the hard data.”

Cheng Xiaonong, an economist and former aide to ousted Party leader Zhao Ziyang, said that high praise of the “China model” is often made on the basis of the high-visibility construction projects, a big GDP, and much money in foreign reserves. “They pay little attention to things such as whether people’s basic rights are guaranteed, or their living standard has improved or not,” he said.

Behind the fiat control of the economy, which can have the appearance of being efficient, there is enormous waste and corruption, Cheng said. It means that little spending is done on education, welfare, the health system, etc.

Cheng says that for the last decade the Chinese regime has accumulated its wealth primarily by promoting real estate development, buying urban and suburban residential properties at low prices (or simply taking them), and selling them to developers at high prices.

According to Cheng, the goals of regime officials (to enrich themselves and increase their power) are in direct conflict with those of the people – so social injustice expands, and economic propaganda meant to portray the situation as otherwise prevails.

Few scholars inside the country dare to speak as Lang has, Cheng said. And that’s probably because he has a professorship in Hong Kong.

The upshot -- says FM Duckster -- is that we knew all along from basic free market economics that socialism and communism doesn't work and so why are we not surprised to hear that the Chinese Communist economy ain't all it has been cracked up to be by the Western drive-by news media?  It's not nice to try and fool Mother Nature or Father Economics.

Obama Offers Israeli PM Pork Chops Laced with Cyanide

(May 20, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Whoa, girl friends, pull up the barn floor, shut up, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.

   President Barack Obama yesterday invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dinner at the White House and served him a hot dish of cyanide.  "Yo, dude, welcome to America.  Here, drink this glass of spiked Kool-Aid," slap, slap, right across the face.

   What did Obama do?

   He jumped onto national TV yesterday while PM Netanyahu boarded his plane from Israel for the US and announced that HE, Obama, thinks Israel should recapitulate all the Israeli real estate from the 1967 10-day War against the Arabs -- who tried to annihilate the Jews -- and bulldoze all the Israeli houses back to pre-1967 boundaries.

   Meanwhile, Obama's modest school board acquaintances, Mr. & Mrs. Ayers from the terrorist Weather Underground fame who blew up police stations and the Pentagon in the 1970s, are piloting a flotilla of pro-Palestinian fanatics toward Israel to protest the existence of the Israeli nation.

   Also meanwhile, President Obama is shoveling billions of dollars of US taxpayer money as "foreign aid" -- yeah, "foreign aid," ha-ha -- to various Middle Eastern nations that are gunning down their own citizens, money that will surely go to the Muslim Brotherhood Islamo-fanatics for military arms and supplies so they can take over their respective nations -- which are coincidentally all rioting in unison -- so the Islamo-fanatics can create a Caliphate.  No, Martha, that's not a new decaf drink from body builders in California.  A Caliphate is the Islamo-fanatics' vision of their Fairytale religion's idea of Paradise on Planet Earth, where the men get to beat women into submission.

   Unfortunately, all of the Earth's major religions are...  More...

Budget cuts are meaningless without Federal Reserve transparency

by Rep Ron Paul
Annotated by FM Duck

Apr 19, 2011

"...two very well-connected Wall Street wives got together and formed a real estate investment company that garnered $220 million in so-called "loans" (free money) from the Fed [during the 2008 financial crisis stimulus money bailout].  Compare this number to the $352 million in spending cuts the CBO says are in the current budget [the real amount, not the fake $38 billion in cuts that both political parties and President Obama argued about]!  A few months later, one of the wives bought a $13.5 million personal residence with her husband, the CEO of Morgan Stanley."

"The unelected, unaccountable Fed hands out as much or more money this way as our federal government spends, and yet receives hardly any attention.  This is why I believe transparency of the Fed is a critical step to regaining control of our financial situation in this country.  We can never get meaningful reforms if all eyes are on the $352 million so-called cuts, and transactions like the $220 million given to Wall Street cronies are done in the shadows."

Washington, DC – Congress focused on issues surrounding government spending this week as talk of deficits, the national debt, and the debt limit saturated the airwaves.  This is a positive development.  In years past, there was very little concern over how much was spent here in Washington, how it was spent, or how much of our gross domestic product was being consumed by government.  That blissful ignorance naturally resulted in decades of government spending with impunity, bringing us to where we are today: trillions in debt with astronomical entitlement obligations that will be impossible to fulfill in the not too distant future.  So it is a good thing that there is so much political pressure now on our leaders to actually put the brakes on runaway spending.

However, even the most generous estimate of the spending cut passed this week – $38.5 billion – is a paltry 3.5% of the $1.05 trillion in spending through the next 5 months.  This hardly makes a dent in our government's mountain of debt.  Even worse than that, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stripped away the accounting sleights of hand and scored it as only $352 million in cuts, which works out to less than half of one percent of spending.  More...

A Union Education...or
What Wisconsin reveals about public workers and political power

by The WSJ editors

Mar 01, 2011

Madison, WI – The raucous Wisconsin debate over collective bargaining may be ugly at times, but it has been worth it for the splendid public education. For the first time in decades, Americans have been asked to look under the government hood at the causes of runaway spending. What they are discovering is the monopoly power of government unions that have long been on a collision course with taxpayers. Though it arrived in Madison first, this crack-up was inevitable.

   We first started running the nearby chart on the trends in public and private union membership many years ago. It documents the great transformation in the American labor movement over the latter decades of the 20th century. A movement once led by workers in private trades and manufacturing evolved into one dominated by public workers at all levels of government but especially in the states and cities.

   The trend is even starker if you go back a decade earlier. In 1960, 31.9% of the private work force belonged to a union, compared to only 10.8% of government workers. By 2010, the numbers had more than reversed, with 36.2% of public workers in unions but only 6.9% in the private economy.

   The sharp rise in public union membership in the 1960s and 1970s coincides...  More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 3 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Feb 03, 2011

"11.  Is "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" a moral principle?"

"12.  Does the motive change the nature of a dictatorship?"

11. Is "The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number" A Moral Principle?

“The greatest good for the greatest number" is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of "the good" in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory. But, you might say, the majority in all these examples did not achieve any real good for itself either? No. It didn't, because "the good" is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

The unthinking assumes that every man who mouths this slogan places himself unselfishly with the smaller number to be sacrificed to the greatest number of others. Why should he? There is nothing in the slogan to make him do this. He is much more likely to try to get in with the greatest number, and start sacrificing others. What the slogan actually tells him is that he has no choice, except to rob or be robbed, to crush or get crushed.

The depravity of this slogan lies in the implication that "the good" of a majority must be achieved through the suffering of a minority; that the benefit of one man depends upon the sacrifice of another.

If we accept the Collectivist doctrine that man exists only for the sake of others, then it is true that every pleasure he enjoys (or every bite of food) is evil and immoral if two other men want it. But on this basis men cannot eat, breathe or love (all of that is selfish, and what if two other men want your wife?), men cannot live together at all, and can do nothing except end up by exterminating one another.

Only on the basis of individual rights can any good -- private or public -- be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake -- neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others -- only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.

Do not think that the opposite of "the greatest good for the greatest number" is "the greatest good for the smallest number." The real opposite is: the greatest good one can achieve by one’s own free effort, to everyone living.

If you are an Individualist and wish to preserve the American way of life, ... More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 2 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Feb 02, 2011

"7.  How do we determine that a right has been violated?"

"8.  What is the proper function of government?"

"9.  Can there be a "mixed" social system?"

"10.  Can a society exist without a moral principle?"

7. How Do We Determine That a Right Has Been Violated?

A right cannot be violated except by physical force. One man cannot deprive another of his life nor enslave him, nor forbid him to pursue happiness, except by using force against him. Whenever a man is made to act without his own free, personal, individual, voluntary consent, his right has been violated.

Therefore, we can draw a clear-cut division between the rights of one man and those of another.  It is an objective division, not subject to differences of opinion, nor to majority decision, nor to the arbitrary decree of society. NO MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO INITIATE THE USE OF PHYSICAL FORCE AGAINST ANOTHER MAN.

The practical rule of conduct in a free society, a society of Individualism, is simple and clear-cut: you cannot expect or demand any action from another man, except through his free, voluntary consent.

Do not be misled on this point by an old collectivist trick which goes like this: (1) There is no absolute freedom anyway, since you are not free to murder, (2) society limits your freedom when it does not permit you to kill, (3) therefore, society holds the right to limit your freedom in any manner it sees fit, (4) therefore, drop the delusion of freedom, and (5) freedom is whatever society decides it is.

It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill, but the inalienable individual right of another man to live. This is not a "compromise" between two rights, but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society, but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society, but is implicit in the definition of your own right.

Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.

8. What Is the Proper Function of Government?

The proper function of government is to protect the individual rights of man; this means to protect man against brute force.

In a proper social system, men do not use force against one another.  Force may be used only in self-defense, that is, in defense of a right violated by force. Men delegate to the government the power to use force in retaliation, and only in retaliation.

The proper kind of government does not initiate the use of force. It uses...  More...

What is the Basic Issue in the World Today? -- Part 1 of 3

by Ayn Rand
annotated by FM Duck
Jan 29, 2011

"1.  What is the basic issue in the world today?"

"2.  What is a social system?"

"3.  What is the basic principle of America?"

"4.  What is a right?"

"5.  What are the inalienable rights of man?"

"6.  How do we recognize one another's rights?"

1. What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?

The basic issue in the world today is between two principles:  Individualism and Collectivism.

Individualism holds that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men. Therefore, each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.

Collectivism holds that man has no rights; that his work, his body and his personality belong to the group; that the group can do with him as it pleases, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of whatever it decides to be its own welfare. Therefore, each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group.

These two principles are the roots of two opposite social systems. The basic issue of the world today is between these two systems.

2. What Is a Social System?

   A social system is a code of laws which men observe in order to live together. Such a code must have a basic principle, a starting point, or it cannot be devised. The starting point is the question: Is the power of society limited or unlimited?

   Individualism answers: The power of society is limited by the inalienable, individual rights of man. Society may make only such laws as do not violate these rights.

   Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.

   Example: Under a system of Individualism, a million men cannot pass a law to kill one man for their own benefit. If they go ahead and kill him, they are breaking the law--which protects his right to life-and they are punished.

   Under a system of Collectivism, a million men (or anyone claiming to represent them) can pass a law to kill one man (or any minority), whenever they think they would benefit by his death. His right to live is not recognized.

   Under Individualism, it is illegal to kill the man and it is legal for him to protect himself. The law is on the side of a right. Under Collectivism, it is legal for the majority to kill a man and it is illegal for him to defend himself. The law is on the side of a number.

   In the first case, the law represents a moral principle.

   In the second case, the law represents the idea that there are no moral principles, and men can do anything they please, provided there are enough of them.

   Under a system of Individualism, men are equal before the law at all times. Each has the same rights, whether he is alone or has a million others with him.

   Under a system of Collectivism, men have to gang up on one another and whoever has the biggest gang at the moment, holds all rights, while the loser (the individual or the minority) has none. Any man can be an absolute master or a helpless slave, according to the size of his gang.

   An example of the first system: The United States of America. (See: The Declaration of Independence.)

   An example of the second system: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany [and President Obama’s America today in 2011].

   Under the Soviet system, millions of peasants or "kulaks" were exterminated...  More...

Toward Sensible Monetary Policy

By Rep Ron Paul (R-TX)

Jan 15, 2011

Washington, DC – Last week the 112th Congress was sworn in.  I am pleased that I will be chairing the Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee, which has oversight of the Federal Reserve.  Obviously, this position will facilitate my efforts to ensure the Fed provides the American people with more information about what they have been doing with and to our money.  Not surprisingly, since my chairmanship was announced, apologists for the Fed have been recycling the old canard about how increased transparency threatens the Fed’s so-called political independence.

   By independence, they are referring to the Fed’s ability to greatly impact the economy with virtually no meaningful oversight.  We only recently learned that the bankers at the Fed were able to use the latest financial crisis to bail out Wall Street cronies and foreign central banks with billions of dollars that were created and wasted, instead of appropriated and voted on by representatives of the people.  The Fed and its supporters in Congress vehemently fought even this small bit of transparency and without this one-time provision in the financial reform act forcing disclosure, we would still not have this information.  Indeed, we are in the dark on so much of what the Fed has done.  This is extremely dangerous for our country, yet this power and secrecy is defended as some kind of public good, which is patently ridiculous.

   Our government is based on a system of checks and balances.  With no check on the Fed, it is no surprise it has thrown the economy...  More...

Reduce Bush Tax Cuts, don't keep it the samo-samo

Dec 18, 2010

Washington, DC -- So... what's wrong with the Obama Bush Tax Cut Bill that the U.S. House and Senate just passed yesterday and that Obama promises to sign immediately?  Think about it.  Relative to our current government spending and deficit in today's economy, the new Bill does not, on net, cut any taxes whatsoever, not even the Soc Sec payroll taxes because they must be made up with further deficits, interest on that deficit, and more taxation to pay for it.  We already, in 2010, have the Bush tax cuts and we're still in a Recession.  The only thing that the left Liberal Progressives did -- and some GOP and even Libertarians in Congress -- was to promise that the government would not increase next year some of the taxes we already have this year.  But simultaneously they INCREASED ALL OTHER TAXES, i.e, spending, plus some new spending and taxation.  Analysis.  We should be voting to REDUCE the Bush Tax Cuts, not keeping them the same.  If we are in a current heavy Recession with high unemployment and moving rapidly to hyper-inflation and a huge Depression right now with the current Bush tax cuts, and the government is not changing its spending or tax cuts relative to what we're already doing now, how does anybody interpret that as something different that will help solve the Recession or unemployment?  No change, no difference.  Think about it for a moment.  Our only choice was not to keep the Bush Tax Cuts or let them expire.  The other choice was to further CUT the current Bush Tax Cuts.   All the Administration did was promise that they would not increase the beatings.  We will not be doing anything differently than we are doing now -- and in fact we will be spending lots more and incurring a bigger deficit -- so, therefore, the new Obama Bush Tax "Cut" Bill will do nothing different, and thus how can we expect a different outcome?  Duh, we've been tricked again.  The economy is going to Hell in a hand basket and all we did was promise to continue doing the same thing, plus worse, which isn't working.  A 12-year-old child can see that we just voted to spend more deficit money and increase our taxes in 2011 and 2012 -- just in time for Obama and his thugs to run again for the White House and try to grab the rest of our freedoms from us in their zeal to create another Socialist Kingdom of Equality.  In the new 2011 Robbery, the Death Tax will go up from zero to 35% of estates over $5 million.  Soc Sec taxes are cut from your left pocket and raised as taxes later from your right pocket.  Unemployment extension payments, which are deficits, are increased.  Even from a stupid Keynesian Economic Village Idiot point of view, how does doing more of the same that isn't working, help solve the economy's problems?  What the stupids in Washington voted for was for the government to not go back to beating the people more than it is already beating us.  Wow.  That's really smart.  As in, Hi, you know the fifty lashes everybody received from the feds every day in 2010?  Well, we promise not to increase that to a hundred lashes every day in 2011 like we used to do in the past.  Whew!  Goodie-goodie gum drops, you idiots.  The better action for the GOP and Libertarians -- which is why Libertarians always lose elections, year after year, -- would have been to vote NO on the Obama Bush Tax Cuts and let the left Liberal Progressives take the hit for passing this pernicious Bill all by themselves, or if the GOP could have swung it, stop the Bill from passing altogether.  Then, next Jan 2011, the majority GOP and Libertarians could pass REAL tax cuts, REAL deficit cuts, REAL spending cuts by introducing each line item of the Obama Bill one by one, such as The Death Tax permanently set to zero, no more unemployment extensions, no Soc Sec payroll cuts without offsetting changes to the Soc Sec system for the youth such as a choice of private pensions, etc.  What has happened is that the left Liberal Progressives have scared the Tea Party, the GOP, and the Libertarians into a compromise and anybody who knows anything about debating knows that as soon as you obtain the sanction of your victims and get them to accept your premises, they lose.  And that's exactly what just happened with the Obama Bush Tax Cut Bill yesterday.  Wake up Tea Party and free market capitalists or you will soon be voting for the government to beat you with only 500 lashes per day instead of the 1,000 lashes they threaten you with tomorrow.  It's called extortion.  Either way, you lose.  You need to throw off the yoke of Big Brother and force them to stop beating you at all:  as in zero lashes per day, and stop playing The Relative Taxation and Spending Game.  Promises by thugs to not beat you up tomorrow more than they are beating you up today is not the answer.  Stop the beatings altogether.  Stop the deficits.  Stop the spending.  Stop the Federal Reserve's hyper-inflation.  Period.  Or it will never end -- except in total chaos and the collapse of the dollar.

Rep Ron Paul chosen as Chair of Banking Subcomittee overseeing Fed Reaserve

Dec 14, 2010

Washington, DC -- News Flash-a-roonie, girl friends!  Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has now been chosen as the Chairman of the Banking Subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve.  Yahoo, baby!  As all you red-hot readers of FM Duck already know, Rep Ron Paul has made it his life long passion in Congress to teach everybody about sound monetary principles and free market capitalism.  He is a Libertarian, well-schooled in Austrian free market economics, and has written a great little book entitled, "END The FED."  As Rep Paul has stated:

"The groundswell of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is reflected not only in the rhetoric coming out of Capitol Hill, but also in the tremendous interest shown by the financial press.  The demand for transparency is growing, whether the political and financial establishment likes it or not.  The Fed is losing its vaunted status as an institution that somehow is above politics and public scrutiny.  Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as subcommittee chairman.

Thanks to public pressure earlier this year, Congress did pass legislation that requires the Fed to disclose some information about its bailout of select industries and companies following the 2008 financial crisis.  So two weeks ago the Fed released data concerning more than $3 trillion of assistance it offered to banks through its bailout facilities.  After reviewing this data, however, we are left with many more questions about the Fed's 'lending'.
 
In the 'Term Securities Lending Facility', the Fed was supposed to have loaned against AAA-rated securities -- yet over half of the collateral put up by banks to obtain loans had no listed credit rating. Should we assume that the Fed accepted absolute junk rated securities as collateral for loans?  Presumably these securities were so bad that they wouldn’t even publicize their credit rating.  So why should our central bank, backed up by your taxes, accept such collateral?
 
On another note, of the $1.25 trillion purchased under the Fed’s 'Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program,' only $877 billion in purchases have been publicized. What happened to the remaining $400 billion?
 
These kinds of limited disclosures by the Fed only underscore the need for a full and complete audit of the Fed’s financial books.  This audit should be done by an independent third party, in the same manner that public companies are audited.  The Fed should make public its balance sheet, income statement, and perhaps most importantly its cash flow statement.  It also should publicize the notes explaining those financial statements.

We seem to forget sometimes that Congress created the Fed -- it is a government-created banking monopoly, and its top decision-makers are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. If the Fed does not perform satisfactorily in the eyes of these politicians and their constituents, the Chairman and Governors may not be re-nominated.

In theory, Congress could even repeal the Federal Reserve Act altogether since it has the authority to do so.  Obviously Congress is within its authority to audit an organization it created by statute, and it is time to assume that responsibility. 
 
With 320 Members of Congress cosponsoring my legislation to fully audit the Fed in the 111th Congress, my hope is that we can build on our broad bipartisan coalition in 2011 and continue the push for greater Fed transparency going forward."

Today's economists are not economists...they are socialists who are busy modeling historical prices of potatoes

Dec 13, 2010

Washington, DC -- Today's Recession is due to a totally fallacious basic theory of socialist "economics."  Almost all the "economists" coming out of school today aren't actually economists.  An economist is someone who describes the way the world works.  True economics is the study of subjective human action, not quantitative differential calculus.  But these people – the Fed Reserve's Chief Ben Bernanke being a perfect example – aren't interested in describing the way it works. Rather, they want to prescribe the way they want it to work, and then get the state to enforce their views on society.  The state, of course, welcomes such advice when it serves its agenda.  Bernanke has a high IQ, but he's just an uninteresting and unoriginal suit.  He grew up with the reigning orthodoxy, got his Ph.D. in it, taught it, and has been rewarded with the leadership of the world's largest central bank.  But he's not an economist. He's a political apologist.  And, he's now a very confused and scared one.  Perhaps he can see that the ridiculous theories he's grown up believing in are more phony than a Federal Reserve note. But he doesn't dare admit it.  So, we will get more and more of the same:  an unelected private banking corporation controlled by the major Wall Street banks, printing up or digitizing trillions and trillions of pulp fiction dollars on the amazing premise that the injection of paper per se, in and of itself, creates value and wealth.  That's like claiming that if I counterfeit a million copies of the Deed To My House and sell each copy in the market for $1,000, I will somehow have create a billion dollars of wealth, when, in reality, all that exists is one Deed To My House, and a lot of lying pieces of non-contractual paper.  And that, mes amies, is exactly what is going on in our economy by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama.  Eventually, this Ponzi Scheme must collapse and those who traded their goods and services and savings for the fake paper will soon wake up one day and find out when the music stops, they have no chair on which to sit.  And their paper and digitized savings have eroded to ZERO.  I hope you're stocking up on physical gold and silver bullion coins.  And storage food.  And guns and ammo to protect yourselves when the starving masses dash around the burbs and then the suburbs to clean out everybody's pantries.  Think about an alternative energy source.

WikiLeaks, Good or Bad?

Dec 11, 2010

Washington, DC -- WikiLeaks, good or bad?  Here's two different points of view, the first from Libertarian Doug Casey at Casey Gold Reports.  Casey essentially agrees with Rep. Ron Paul, a Libertarian GOP Congressman.  Paraphrasing Doug Casey...  "WikiLeaks has become one of the most important watchdog organizations on the planet, helping to expose a lot of government action for what it really is.  This latest leak of a quarter of a million classified U.S. embassy cables is quite a coup, not just for revealing China's changing attitudes about North Korea, but for exposing discussions the U.S. had with other countries about bombing Iran, espionage conducted by U.S. diplomats in Paraguay, Chinese government attacks on Google, and more mundane things like the lavish lifestyles of Kazakhstan's political elite.  Shining a light on the sociopaths who hide in the dark places under the rocks of government is always a good thing. Just as they recently did in their exposé of what is going on with the counterproductive U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It's great to have a whistleblower organization like them.  Julian Assange, who runs it, is a hero, and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize – although it's a shame that prize has become so meaningless and degraded.  And on a more fundamental philosophical level, this is in keeping with my sense of justice.  Crooks should not get away with their crimes just because they hold lofty titles, wear spiffy uniforms, and call their crimes great deeds necessitated by 'national security,' 'economic stimulus,' or whatever other nonsensical lies they come up with.  The whole idea of 'national security' has gotten completely out of control. It has about zero to do with protecting what little is left of America; it's all about protecting, and building, the U.S. government, and the people who participate in it and profit from it.  People fail to understand that the US Government doesn't represent them, or care about them – or at least not any more than a farmer cares about his milk cows.  It's an entity unto itself at this point. It has its own interests, which have only an accidental or coincidental overlap with those of America.  Government is by its very nature duplicitous and predatory; it always puts itself first. By cynically paying lip service to traditional values, and whipping up a nationalistic, patriotic fervor, they can get Boobus americanus to go along with almost anything they propose."  From another perspective, the Glenn Beck perspective, Glenn thinks it's too much of a coincidence that left-leaning socialist WikiLeaks just happened to pop up when Obama's socialist FCC Czar is pulling off a bureaucratic end run around recent rulings of the U.S. Congress and Judicial Branch that said the government cannot implement the Fairness Doctrine -- i.e., shut down all Conservative talk show hosts.  Because of WikiLeaks, according to Glenn Beck, Obama's FCC Czar now has a ready-made National Security Reason to take over the entire Internet and all communications media in the U.S.  What a coinkydink:  WikiLeaks pops up just in time to provide a "reason" for the FCC to take over freedom of speech in America?  Is WikiLeaks a knowing participant of this "conspiracy" against the First Amendment or did they just happen to stumble into it?  Who knows?  The jury is still out.  One thing's for sure.  Sweden's sex charges against WikiLeaks' Julian Assange are totally bogus and were no doubt instigated by the U.S. Government as well as the government goons in other nations to buy time so they can fry his ass for some other ha-ha "national security" reason.  How would you like to jump into the sack with some voluptuous Swedish babe in Stockholm and get arrested because there's a Swedish law against your condom accidentally breaking?  Duh, yeah, Sveden is soooo Progressive, yah?

Meet The 35 Foreign Banks That Got Bailed Out By The Fed

Dec 04, 2010

New York, NY -- One may be forgiven to believe that via its FX liquidity swap lines the Fed only bailed out foreign Central Banks, which in turn took the money and funded their own banks. It turns out that is only half the story: we now know the Fed also acted in a secondary bail out capacity, providing over $350 billion in short term funding exclusively to 35 foreign banks, of which the biggest beneficiaries were UBS, Dexia and BNP. Since the funding provided was in the form of ultra-short maturity commercial paper it was essentially equivalent to cash funding. In other words, between October 27, 2008 and August 6, 2009, the Fed spent $350 billion in taxpayer funds to save 35 foreign banks. And here people are wondering if the Fed will ever allow stocks to drop: it is now more than obvious that with all banks leveraging the equity exposure to the point where a market decline would likely start a Lehman-type domino, there is no way that the Brian Sack-led team of traders will allow stocks to drop ever... Until such time nature reasserts itself, the market collapses without GETCO or the PPT being able to catch it, and the Fed is finally wiped out in one way or another. 

The 35 companies in question:

UBS
Dexia SA
BNP Paribas
Barclays PLC
Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Commerzbank AG
Danske Bank A/S
ING Groep NV
WestLB
Handelsbanken
Deutsche Post AG
Erste Group Bank AG
NordLB
Free State of Bavaria
KBC
HSH Nordbank AG
Unicredit
HSBC Holdings PLC
DZ Bank AG
Republic of Korea
Rabobank
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
Banco Espirito Santo SA
Bank of Nova Scotia
Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd.
Syngenta AG
Mitsui & Co Ltd
Bank of Montreal
Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
Shinhan Financial Group Co Ltd
Mitsubishi Corp
Aegon NV
Royal Bank of Canada
Sumitomo Corp  by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge dot.com

And this is why the Fed Reserve doesn't want to be audited by Congress.  Because it would reveal that the Fed has not only been illegally bailing out foreign banks, they have also been illegally leasing America's gold to foreign nations to earn profits for themselves.  That's why this year's Banking Reform Bill signed off by President Obama purposefully omitted Rep. Ron Paul's initial Audit The Fed requirements that would have forced the Fed would undergo a full audit every year.  Congress and the Federal Reserve are robbing the American citizens blind by going off the gold standard, counterfeiting, our pulp fiction dollars, and bailing out their banking buddies throughout the entire world.  Who says crime doesn't pay?  Time to abolish the Fed.

No Price Inflation?  Really?

Dec 11, 2010

Washington, DC – Yo, social security recipients.  Social Security is not welfare -- at least not for most of the old folks over age 62.  The government forced you and your "employer" under penalty of fines and imprisonment to pay social security over your entire working lifetime.  Those who were self employed, paid double (15%) as the "employee" and the "employer."  Did the Feds invest YOUR Soc Sec money at 5% per year?  Or even 1% per year?  Hell no.  Did they set up a personal retirement account for each Soc Sec individual?  No.  In fact, Congress "borrowed" YOUR Soc Sec money and spent it on other budget crap without paying it back into the Soc Sec trust fund.  So, do they owe it to you to pay YOUR money back to YOU?  You're damned straight they do.  So stop feeling guilty about receiving YOUR money back.  As it currently stands, however, you will NOT receive a cost of living allowance (COLA) for a second year in a row now because Congress and the Feds are lying about the real inflation rate of the goods and services you consume on a daily basis.  Read the following, compiled by Jake Weber, of Casey Gold Research:  “Inflation in the Real World.  As is often the case, there is a big difference between what the government statistics are reporting and what’s going on in the real world.  According to the most recent inflation reading published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), consumer prices grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in August.

The government has an incentive to distort CPI numbers, for reasons such as keeping the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments low.  While there’s no question that you may be able to get a good deal on a new car or a flat-screen TV today, how often are you really buying these things?  When you look at the real costs of everyday life, prices have risen sharply over the last year.  For simplicity’s sake, consider the cash market prices on some basic commodities.

Year-over-year price changes Oct 2010 (source: Casey Research 2010):

Wheat – 74%
Corn – 14%
Oats – 68%
Canola – 36%
Heating Oil – 29%
Gasoline – 25%
Natural Gas – 15%
Beef – 18%
Pork – 60%
Coffee – 27%
Sugar – 44%
Cotton – 66%
Copper – 37%
Gold – 31%
Silver – 36%
Govt’s Lying Consumer Price Index – 1.1% (Aug 2010)

On average, our basic food costs have increased by an incredible 48% over the last year (measured by wheat, corn, oats, and canola prices).  From the price at the pump to heating your stove, energy costs are up 23% on average (heating oil, gasoline, natural gas).  A little protein at dinner is now 39% higher (beef and pork), and your morning cup of coffee with a little sugar has risen by 36% since last October.

You probably aren’t buying new linens or shopping for copper piping at the hardware store every day, but I included these items to show the inflationary pressures on some other basic materials that will likely affect consumer prices down the road.

The jump in gold and silver prices illustrates that it’s not just supply and demand issues driving the precious metals higher – the decline in purchasing power of the dollar is also showing up in the price of physical goods.  It is because stashing wheat and cotton in the garage is an impractical way to protect purchasing power that investors are increasingly looking to protect themselves with the monetary metals – a trend that is now very much in motion.”

545 People

by Charlie Reese

Oct 19, 2010

Washington, DC – Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.  The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress.  In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.  They have no legal authority.

They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.

I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The politician has the power to accept...  More...

Central banks create $4.7 trillion mortgage foreclosure debacle with fractional reserve monetary concepts

Oct 10, 2010

New York, NY – Whoa, girl friends, jump off your side saddles, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Four major U.S. banks, B of A, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup, handle-service-screw-around-with $4.7 trillion, or 70%, of the home mortgage market money that was used as collateral to create investment derivatives such as CDs with fancy sounding names like Super Duper You Bet Safe As Hell Pension Fund 1001 for people to invest their life savings into to earn interest so they can have a retirement pension to live on when they hit age 65.

   Unfortunately, it looks like those Super Duper Pension Funds won’t be there.

   Why?

   Because the basis for the Super Duper Pension Funds, the collapsing value of homes and, thus, the collapsing value of the home mortgages that home owners are supposed to pay to their banks each month, are not being paid.

   Home owners are defaulting on their house payments and either walking away or simply living in their home without making any payments whatsoever.  Home prices are continuing to collapse with no end in sight and Mr. Average Home Buyer ain’t forking over house payments to the banks because (1) he lost his job, and (2) the value of his house is a lot lower than the mortgage balance of his loan.  He is underwater and drowning in debt, debt originally created by our central bank, the Federal Reserve, in a maze of fallacious Economic Wizardry concocted at places like Harvard and Wall Street.

   Time for the banks to foreclose, right?  Wrong.  Why not?  Because if all the banks in the U.S. foreclosed on all the homes that aren’t being paid for and brought those foreclosures onto their accounting books, all the banks in the U.S. would have to declare bankruptcy.  That’s why the Obama Administration and Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are doing nothing to push foreclosures on the American public, besides the fact they can’t physically process that much paperwork in our life time.  Mainly, it would show us how bad off we really are… and, by the way, you know, as an aside, it would cause the entire frickin economy to crash and burn like the economic snow ball from hell that it really is.

   So, what did the above four major Banksta Gangstas do yesterday?  That’s right, they stopped all foreclosures on their $4.7 trillion of home mortgages until they could rearrange the deck chairs and try to tap dance their way off the deck of the sinking Titanic.

   The Bigger question is:  how in hell did we arrive at this point?

   That’s easy.  Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.  We got to here by adopting the same concepts and absurd economic principles as the central bankers adopted for creating paper money and credit out of thin air with no real collateral.  It’s called:  fractional reserve banking, in which the banks issue more debt, more paper I.O.U.s, more non-backed promissory notes, more pulp fiction U.S. Dollars than the hard commodity collateral for which the legal tender notes are supposed to represent.  In short, the central banking bastards have been legally counterfeiting our money with the full knowledge and consent of Congress so they can spend tons of money they don’t have like drunken sailors on shore leave.  It’s called a “stimulus.”  It used to be called “counterfeiting.”

   Let’s get down and dirty and put it in "street talk." ...  More...

Obama's Three Economic Fallacies...or,
Why He Doesn't Get It

Oct 1, 2010

Washington, DC – Has anybody else noticed a consistent theme running through President Obama's ideology of state collectivism through which he is attempting to "fundamentally transform America?"  There are three basic economic fallacies uponst which rest Obama's ridiculous programs:

Economic Fallacy # 1:  Wealth is finite,
Economic Fallacy # 2:  Value resides in labor per se, and
Economic Fallacy # 3:  Money is non-collateralized paper or credit.

   Let's blow apart these three fallacies.

   (1) Wealth is not finite.  Wealth is infinite and is the result of...  More...

Energy - Part 3 of 3

Why Are We Still Drilling for Oil When We Have Tesla’s Free Radiant Energy?

(Sep 18, 2010)

In 1943, JP Morgan Jr. et al. murdered Nikola Tesla.  The feds tried to cover it up as “natural causes” but the New York coroner’s report lists Tesla’s cause of death as “poison.”

In the 1890’s, JP Morgan Sr. et al. murdered Maxwell’s Equations and Electrical Engineering, killing off Tesla’s discoveries of free wireless energy from “the vacuum of space-time.”  The result is that today, and for the last 100 years, the world has been using dirty fossil fuel or dirty nuclear fission instead of a clean, renewable, almost infinite source of free energy from the “vacuum.”

In 1913, JP Morgan Sr. was one of the central bankers who pushed the U.S. Congress into creating the Federal Reserve so they, the bankers, could control the U.S. money supply and thus all market sectors, especially energy.

Today, in 2010, JP Morgan Co. is one of the four major bullion banks that the President’s Economic Advisors -- aka The Plunge Protection Team -- conspire with to manipulate the buying and selling of precious metals, gold and silver futures in the commodities market, trying to prop up the hyper-inflated Federal Reserve Note.

So, if we connect the dots between all of these manipulations in the energy and monetary sectors by JP Morgan Co. and other special interest groups in Washington DC, we discover that most everything we learned about money, financing, and energy is a series of big fat lies.  And those lies continue to this day in 2010.

“There is enough EFTV energy in one thimbleful of the space time continuum to power every electrical device currently in existence on planet Earth.” -- Tom Bearden.

   One of the men who brought you pulp fiction dollars via a central banking cartel called the Federal Reserve is the same man who bankrupted Nikola Tesla.  The banker’s son then allegedly had Tesla murdered (poisoned) in order to prevent Tesla from (1) disseminating information about his free radiant energy machines, and (2) going to Washington to show President FDR how he could construct a series of energy shields to protect the U.S. from foreign attacks.  That man and his son were JP Morgan Sr. and JP Morgan Jr., respectively, the same Morgans who co-founded General Electric Co. with Thomas Edison.  Their purpose?  To prevent Tesla from competing against Morgan’s new oil business.

   JP Morgan elicited the services of physicist H.A. Lorentz to re-gauge (alter) Maxwell’s Equations at the turn of the 20th century regarding the source of Electro Magnetic energy available in electrical circuits.  This was done in order to hide the fact that Maxwell showed how one could pull a trillion times more energy from the active space-time medium (the vacuum) in a standard electrical circuit than the puny amount of electron energy we currently use today.

   Lorentz's “symmetricized” Maxwell’s Equations were changed to convince the 30 or so electro-dynamicists (electrical engineers) of the day that no excess energy was being pulled from the seething EM “vacuum.”  This charade was continued by shoving the changed equations into university text books after the early 1900s, which is where they sit today, rotting the brains of current EE students who, of course, just memorize crap for their tests and ask no further questions.  Nothing has changed over the last 100 years and what today’s Electrical Engineers (EE’s) learn at all major universities are the erroneously “symmetrical” Maxwell Equations created (re-gauged) precisely to hide the huge amount of free energy available from space because JP Morgan’s Big Oil cartel would have been bankrupted by this information about free energy from the vacuum.

   The upshot is that anybody who goes back and questions the original equations – not likely, and not many -- and discovers the discrepancies is either ridiculed or run out of EE grad school.  Meanwhile, down the hall in the Physics Dept, physicists are busy winning Nobel Prizes for showing the “extra” Maxwell Equation Poynting and Heaviside radiant energy streaming into standard EE circuits that EE majors are taught to purposely ignore...  More...

Energy - Part 2 of 3

The Asteroid Belt and How It Got There after the Planet Phaeton Blew Up...Will History Repeat Itself?

(July 9th, 2010)

The Asteroid Belt is what remained of planet Phaeton (aka Malona or Malon) after it exploded during a great civil war in which the Malonans induced tremendous quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano which triggered the cosmic catastrophe, approximately 75,000 years ago. – as explained by ET human Semjase in Guido Moosbrugger’s book And Still They Fly

Washington, DC – What does the current BP oil spill have in common with today’s Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter?  Read on.

   75,000 years ago, the planets of our solar system were arranged in the following order outward from the Sun:  Mercury, Earth with its Moon, Phaeton (Malona), Mars, no Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus with its moons (one of which, 10,000 years ago, was ripped out of orbit by the gravity of a passing Destroyer Comet and then moved into orbit around the Sun as Venus), Neptune, Pluto, Transpluto, and Uni.  Transpluto has already been discovered by Earth scientists, Uni has not but it will be.

   Take the following as a given, I will quote sources later:  we are not alone in our universe and there exist many universes in many dimensions at various levels of evolution.  “Not alone” means the existence of both ET humans and ET non-humans, all at various stages of evolution.  Relevant to our discussion about energy, suffice it to say that the planet Phaeton (or Malona) and Mars were both populated by ET humans many thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of which had immigrated from other galaxies and solar systems to our solar system for various reasons, some of which were political.  This is not science fiction; this is for real.  The inhabitants of Malona were not without their own internal social and political intrigues, just like humans on planet Earth today.

  Sources claim the Malonans duked it out over who knows what trivial piece of political crap – just like Earth humans today -- but the major point for our energy discussion is how they blew themselves up.

   It seems like the dummies on Malona got carried away in their civil war and directed huge quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano, causing a super volcanic explosion that eventually blew their planet into many chunks that now populate our solar system as what we call The Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.  Only a few individuals escaped from Malona.  They made their way to Earth, mingling with the indigenous humans.  That was 75,000 years ago.

   When Melona blew the first chunk of its planet into space, the larger portion of the planet moved into Mars’ orbit where, in subsequent explosions, Malona finally blew itself to nothing except solar rubble orbiting the Sun, the majority of which is now known on Earth as The Asteroid Belt, orbiting around our Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  After the last explosions, Mars moved into Malona’s previous orbit leaving an orbital gap between Mercury and Earth, perhaps due to the gravitational force of Mars and The Asteroid Belt pulling toward Jupiter and opening that slot.  In fact, 65,000 years later (10,000 years ago), Venus (originally a moon of Uranus) moved into this gap, its present orbit, as the 2nd rock from the Sun.  Interestingly, the Earth exhibited such a strong gravitational force on Uranus’ displaced moon, soon-to-be Venus, as it moved from Uranus past Earth and eventually captured between Mercury and Earth, that it slowed Venus’ rotation and orbit around the Sun into retrograde – which means opposite the rotation and orbit of all the other planets in our solar system.

   In short, The Asteroid Belt is what remained of planet Phaeton (aka Malona or Malon) after it exploded during their great civil war, in which the Malonans [stupidly] induced tremendous quantities of seawater into the crater of a volcano which triggered the cosmic catastrophe, approximately 75,000 years ago.  (Source:  ET human Semjase in Guido Moosbrugger’s book And Still They Fly www.figu.org)

   And what is the significance of the inhabitants of Phaeton blowing themselves to oblivion and our Earth’s current BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?  More...

Energy - Part 1 of 3

BP’s Quest for Time

The Well from Hell... And What They're Not Saying

by

Christian A. DeHaemer, Editor Energy & Capital

(Friday, June 18th, 2010)

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what, they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame. -- Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

Washington, DC -- There is something primordial about BP's quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It's an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep.

   I don't know if you've stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do...

   The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That's the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim.  And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that -- Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare.

   Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed.

   It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas -- the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people.

   More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane.  According to the New York Times, BP's internal "documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of 'well control.'  And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.”

   The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure.  Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi -- far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff valves and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi.  It was an accident waiting to happen.  And there are many that say it could get worse -- much worse.

   Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

   According to CNN:

   The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May.  And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles.  Some geologists say that BP's arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into a deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

Need the Mudlogs

   Geologist Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored.  So far, no one has seen them.  BP keeps them hidden.

   Mr. Landau claims:

   It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

   What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mud weight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky.

   But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work.

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn't fallen off

   In fact... it's increased.

   The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano.

   I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

   Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi.  Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.  These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.  That said, a bubble this large -- if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack -- would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens... only under water.  More...

America: a walking dead-zombie country

By

Von Lars Schall at www.Chaostheorien, Germany

Friday, Aug 20, 2010

“The most revealing aspect of the BP oil spill was that it showed to the world that America currently has no President.  At least with Bush you knew where he stood.  I believe with Obama there is nobody home.  He is a ghost.  He doesn’t do anything.  He is a Manchurian Candidate, he is a robot, he is nothing.  He has done nothing, he is doing nothing, he will never do anything.  Obama is just waiting to get a job at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan in three or four year’s time and that’s it.  The White House is a way to improve his resume.  The BP oil spill revealed that America is running with no leadership at all.  There is nobody at the helm of the ship.  It’s running wild with no leadership whatsoever.”

The high-profile financial pundit Max Keiser doesn’t shy away from crystal-clear, unmistakable statements. The following exclusive interview is no exception. Mr. Keiser sees an attack exercised against the majority of people in the U.S., sets out why gold is in no bubble at all, points at a remarkable move by the Harvard University, and has an advice to some US-American billionaires disguised as noble philanthropists: “Just pay your taxes and shut up!”

Mr. Keiser, in your initial email you wrote to me:

“The key to understanding the current situation is to understand that house prices, jobs, wages, and pensions in the US are all being attacked with original-issue debt dollar junk.

This will continue until the middle class has been completely wiped out.”

Can you elaborate on this, please?

Yes, it’s a Financial Holocaust. It is designed to destroy the American middle-class. We face an original-issue deflation, if you will. It is as if Michael Milken ran the Fed. If you look at the work of Steve Keen (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/), an economist in Australia and one of a very few economists who got the crisis of the past three years accurate, you understand that the banking system does not work on a system where deposits are the basis for fractional reserve. The banking system works on the basis of loans used as the collateral for more loans.

That means that the origination of all the fractional reserve lending that is going on is just more debt. There are no retail deposit reserves or wholesale deposit reserves, just original issue dollar based junk debt. And when you understand that debt is at the bottom of the pyramid and that there’s no equity at all, or capital as this term is usually understood, then you understand that the banks and the policy makers are continuing a programme at the behest of Wall Street to commit a Financial Holocaust to eliminate the majority in America, which is the middle-class. Wall Street banks with their CDS's, High Frequency Trading and bogus market making are injecting the equivalent of financial Zyklon B into the American and world economy.

With regard to the U.S. economy, would you agree with Paul Krugman, who wrote not a long time ago that the lights in the U.S. are about to go out?[1]

Paul Krugman is a salon monkey. You can quote me on that.

Okay, no problem (laughs).

He is a tool of the New York Times. If it wasn’t for the New York Times, no one would read Paul Krugman. He has absolutely nothing credible to say. He is merely a mouthpiece for neo-liberal clap-trap. Any minute you spend reading Paul Krugman is a minute of your life that you’ll never get back.

How does the mainstream media -- not only in the U.S., but in the Western hemisphere in general -- play its part to ascertain its recipients that everything is more or less alright?

Well, the mainstream media is owned by the banking system. There is no widely disseminated media-outlet that is not owned by the banking system. Every media-outlet in the United States – Fox News, CNN, The New York Times etc. – is an extension of CNBC and James Cramer.

How do you feel in this context about the attempts to regulate the internet?

It’s a sad chapter in American history, because the internet came into being as the result of the good will of the American taxpayer. Now you have private corporations like Google and Verizon, who are stealing it. That’s unconscionable. It’s a hanging offense. If there would be any justice, the principles of Google and Verizon would be strung up and beaten.

Will those attempts have bad effects for the journalism that’s going on in the internet?

Yes.

What is your take on the “Financial Reform Act” that passed Congress a few weeks ago? Does it deserve its name?

No. I’ve talked with Bill Black about this and he made all the salient points: it’s purely cosmetic, does nothing to address the structural problems and is dead on arrival.[2]

You’ve already mentioned the problem of deflation. The Federal Reserve tries to fix this problem, allegedly, with a new round of quantitative easing. Will this not make everything worse?

Well, getting back to the original question: the Fed can only issue debt. So they’re trying to fix the debt-deflation problem by issuing more debt. Whatever drugs Ben Bernanke is on, he should either take less, take more or change his prescription.

Related to the deflation in the U.S., More...

Carbs against Cardio
  by
Melinda Wenner Moyer
Scientific American – Medicine & Health – May 2010 Issue
(June 03, 2010)

More data that refined carbohydrates, not fats, threaten the heart. – Melinda Moyer

And this is precisely why the free market should rule in health care (and in all other commodities and services), not the government, because if the government is wrong we have no freedom of recourse to correct our errors, only an immovable bureaucracy cast in stone. – FM Duck

New York, NY – Eat less saturated fat:  that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years.  But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer.  Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why:  investigators may have picked the wrong culprit.  Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does – a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

   In March the American Journal of clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis – which combines data from several studies – that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years.  The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

   The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter...  More...

$145 Billion and Counting

By Wall Street Journal Op Ed
(May 11, 2010)

New York, NY -- Fannie Mae yesterday announced its 11th consecutive quarterly loss—$11.5 billion—and asked for another $8.4 billion in taxpayer assistance. When it comes to losing money, nobody does it better than this government-created mortgage investor.

  Fannie Mae is the Cal Ripken of bad real-estate deals, reliably pouring taxpayer money into the housing market. Granted, Fannie faces tough competition from its toxic twin, Freddie Mac, which last week announced its own request for another $10.6 billion from taxpayers.

  Once the checks from Treasury clear, Fan and Fred will have consumed a combined $145 billion in taxpayer cash, and the end is nowhere in sight. Both companies warned of further losses triggering more government assistance, which is now unlimited after a 2009 Treasury decision.

  The losses are unlimited because the companies are now run by the government not to make money, by deliberately subsidizing housing. In yesterday's press release, CEO Mike Williams didn't even pretend that he's running a profit-making business. "In the first quarter we continued to serve as a leading source of liquidity to the mortgage market, and we made solid progress in our ongoing efforts to keep people in their homes," he said. These efforts to support the Obama anti-foreclosure program resulted in...More...

Our World Balances On a Sea of Debt

Mar 06, 2010
by
Darius Guppy

“The banks that control the world’s supply of money are no better than counterfeiters – and their systems of juggling debt have left the global economy teetering on the brink of ruin.” -- Darius Guppy, convicted Dutch counterfeiter

The following article aptly describes how fractional reserve banking is simply another form of counterfeiting, pointing out the conceptual difference between (1) real money and (2) a paper receipt for real money.  Then as the counterfeiting by fractional reserve bankers grows exponentially, as it must, the central bankers – witness former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan as he embraces the erroneous concept that he can impute value to paper money per se -- start believing in their own monetary lies and create even more complicated counterfeit investment vehicles backed by nothing but hot air, such as fake mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations based upon non-collateralized future daydreams, and then gambling pieces of paper called Credit Default Swaps whose clever function consists of betting against the previously-created fractional reserve derivatives.  That’s like a counterfeiter soliciting bets that the cops will soon catch him at his counterfeiting activities, in order to mitigate his losses.  So, the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs who sit on the board of Governors of the Fed Reserve sell fractional reserve hedge fund derivatives to clients while down the hall they short their clients’ very same hedge funds with Credit Default Swaps, betting that their hedge funds will fail.  That’s worse than prostitutes who only make their money going in; the bankers make their money both going in and pulling it out, shorting their own hedge funds.  This continues until they can’t keep it up any longer and the market crashes and burns.  Not to worry.  It’s called a Recession, then a Depression as everybody points fingers at everybody else and the bankers blame it on a “systemic risk,” or the U.S. Congress who is also participating in this monetary gang bang, or the vagaries of a non-existent free market capitalism, or a mysterious virus from Mars. – FM Duck

“If I could counterfeit the Pink Slip to my ’57 Chevy and sell a million copies to the suckers in my neighborhood for $1,000 each, while replacing the words ’This is to Certify that There Exists One ’57 Chevy on Deposit at FM Duck’s Warehouse Payable to the Bearer of This Note on Demand’ to ’Virtual Non-Existent Car,’ I could make a fortune.  And that’s exactly what the Federal Reserve is doing with fractional reserve banking of the U.S. Dollar and going off the gold standard.” – FM Duck

Netherlands, Europe – In 1994, there resided in the cell next to mine a certain “Tommy”. He had been imprisoned for counterfeiting Dutch Guilders to such a high standard that he had fooled the banks themselves.

   As was customary among prisoners who became friends, Tommy allowed me to read his legal papers and I became fascinated by the judge’s sentencing speech, the gist of which was that his activities had been parasitical. By creating money out of thin air he had reduced the purchasing power of more deserving members of society. What would happen if everyone behaved like him?

   I thought of arguments used, in a different context, regarding inflation. Like counterfeiting, it dilutes the value of the community’s wealth and constitutes a social evil. Creating too much money – “real” or “fake” – can wreck an economy. Such was the Nazis’ reasoning when they planned to ruin Britain’s economy by flooding the country with near-perfect counterfeit bills.

   A lot of nonsense has been written about the world’s current economic woes – about how the crash is the fault solely of the banks and, by implication, governments are blameless; and how it could all have been avoided, and can be put right, by greater financial regulation.

   It is a classic example of what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre terms “the fallacy of managerial expertise”: an attempt by “experts” to blind us with science to justify their overpaid existences and mask their confusion. After all, not one of them was able to predict the current debacle.

   These “experts” will tell you that the present difficulties are simply the result of abuses and excesses in a system that is basically sound. All that is required is for some faults to be corrected. Do not believe them. The reality is that the problem is systemic and a little tinkering here or there will achieve nothing in the long term.

   What is needed is a root-and-branch re‑evaluation of that most curious of cultural inventions, money: how it is created, how it circulates, and how it can best be used to serve the interests of the community.

   To begin, the experts must explain in the simplest terms how money actually works. Were one to ask the man on the street – or, indeed, most politicians and bankers – who creates the money that rules our lives they would reply “the State”. They would be wrong. It is true that governments create legal tender – the physical notes and coins that circulate in an economy – but that represents, at its highest, only 3 per cent of the total money in circulation in the global economy. It is the commercial banks, largely unaccountable and privately owned, that create the world’s money.

   Indeed, even if Tommy were responsible for printing every note in circulation throughout the world his power to dilute the rest of our wealth would amount to only a tiny fraction of that of the real manufacturers of money. His activities and the activities of the bankers are, in essence, identical: the creation of money out of nothing.

   Without knowing it, therefore, Tommy’s judge punished him for usurping not so much the role of the State as the role of the banks. The same mistake – the mis-identification of where money truly originates – has been made by virtually all of our politicians, economists and financial commentators.

   Consider the contradiction at the heart of neo-liberal, monetarist economics that has constituted the Western orthodoxy for the past few decades: to emphasize on the one hand that the money supply should be brought under control while simultaneously allowing banking – where the money is actually manufactured – to run riot.

   To grasp how the global fraud works we need to step back in time and imagine ourselves next to the original goldsmith-banker.

   In his vault, 10 of his customers each deposit a bar of gold...  More...

European Central Bankers Poised to Take Over Europe
Feb 10, 2010

Herman Van Rompuy, the EU's new president, has submitted a text calling for the creation of an "economic government" that shifts responsibility for economic planning from national authorities to the "EU level."

EU Commission chief Jose Barroso said, "Brussels has treaty powers allowing it to take the reins of economic management."

Brussels, Belgium -- Whoa, girl friends, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  You won't believe what the ruling elite of the European Union has in store for all of its member nations.  Would you believe:  a complete takeover of every European nation's sovereignty?  A total usurpation of the constitutions and national authority -- Parliaments and Congresses -- of member nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany and others?  All on the premise of "solving" the current economic crisis.

   Wait a New York minute here, folks.  Who was it that created the current economic crisis in the first place?  Why, it was the European central bankers, just like in America it was the Federal Reserve central bankers.  Who has inflated the crap out of the Euro?  Who has intervened into the European Union countries' economies with tons and tons of state collectivist rules, regulations, and special interest legislation, rendering the member nations as economic serfs to the interests of the EU banking cartel?  The European Central Bank, that's who.

   Yo, Americans, sound familiar?

   And now, just like in America as the Fed Reserve in cahoots with the state collectivists in Congress and both the Bush and Obama administrations, the European Union central bankers pretend the global Depression is some mysterious virus from Mars or somewhere that they, qua central banking elastic currency gurus, must solve by taking over every nation on the planet, starting with the EU nations.

   So, the EU central bankers are meeting in Brussels to "solve" their Big Fat Greek Economic problem.

   Talk about globe trotters, 24 central bankers last Friday...  More...

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows
by
David Reilly
Feb 05, 2010

New York, NY Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc, you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

   Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

   The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received...  More..

ObamaCare is not about health care; it’s about control and profits.  Oddly enough, it’s not the insurance companies; it’s the central bankers…
Dec 21, 2009

ObamaCare is not about health care.  It is all about control and power.  Not by the government, however, but by the central bankers.  The central bankers do not care about controlling the direction or outcome of the War on Health Care; they care about controlling the debt that will be incurred by nationalized health care.  That’s why every government action in a collectivist state must be couched as a War:  a War on Education, a War on Drugs, a War on Housing, a War on Cars, a War on Climate Change, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and Korea and WW I and WW II and all the other wars in every country in the world.  Somebody has to finance it.  And the central bankers of the world pushing inflationary policies of ‘elastic paper currencies’ are standing ready to loan governments – often both sides of a war -- all the cash they want to finance their giant collectivist Welfare States built upon paper promises.  Obama, of course, doesn’t understand this about the Federal Reserve.  He’s just running to stay in place, to stay in power, pushing his socialist agenda because he’s not very intelligent and he actually believes in socialism.  But the central bankers understand that ObamaCare is not about health care.  It is simply one more chunk of indebtedness that the Federal Reserve stands prepared to finance and control with pulp fiction dollars.  Printed out of thin air.  Not backed by gold or anything else except pulp fiction promises.  The Brits did it.  The European Union countries succumbed to it.  Cuba, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Latin American Banana Republics have all sunk into central banking indebtedness.  Now, as ObamaCare threatens to pass both Houses of the U.S. Congress, the people of America will soon become complete slaves to the private U.S. central banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, whose only goal is:  expanding and controlling the debt.  Follow the money.  ObamaCare is not about health care, it’s all about controlling a nation’s future indebtedness with elastic, non-backed, pulp fiction money.  That is the true purpose of a central bank, which makes the concept of “systemic risk” all the more funnier in an ironic sort of way since the system already failed as soon as it succumbed to the central bankers.

Washington, DC –  A small panel of selected Democrats voted on ObamaCare in the dead of night, early this morning at 1 a.m., to pass their nationalized health care plan that will drive America into a huge indebtedness.  Actually, they didn’t vote directly on the 2,100-page health care bill.  They voted on a 383-page “manager’s amendment” in a secret meeting with extreme left Liberals behind closed doors… with no debate.

   The 383-page “amendment” detailed plans by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to rip-off the other 49 states to “guarantee” the last Democratic vote hold-out, Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska), a 100% Medicaid payoff for Nelson’s state, in perpetuity, which means:  forever.  Plus, the Obama administration promised to withdraw its threat to close all the military bases in Nebraska if Senator Nelson promised to vote to support Socialist Obama’s nationalized health care program.  So, of course, crooked Senator Nelson, who apparently has been pretending to be a hold-out on ObamaCare unless the socialist health care plan sufficiently addressed his concerns about abortion rules, melted faster than a hot cube of butter in the Mojave Desert.

   Should we blame the last hold-out?  After all, the Obama Administration has made all kinds of deals with our Parliament of Whores to get his health bill passed.  Louisiana Senate Hooker Mary Landrieu sold her body, mind, and soul for $300 million and was proud to announce it on national TV last week.

   Senator Nelson is not the only guilty party.  He was simply the last to cave-in.  Senator Lieberman “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder where I’m at” was the second to the last to be bought off by America’s Head Pimp Obama.  All 60 Democratic senators are just as guilty as Nelson and Lieberman for selling out the American people – the majority of whom, 60% or higher, depending on which poll, oppose ObamaCare.

   As today’s Wall Street Journal details in a well-written, long Op Ed entitled, “Change Nobody Believes In,” ObamaCare is a morass of unintelligible gobbledegook of bureaucratic baloney that nobody understands, nobody will be able to implement, and the financial consequences of which threaten to bankrupt not only just the health care sector of America, but all related industries, too.  It will not just be 14% of the market economy that constitutes health care that gets financially whacked out of shape.  The entire economy will suffer as employers and individuals scramble through the unintended economic consequences brought about by this labyrinth of contradictory oxymoronic law and non sequiturs.  You must do A, but first you must do B, but if you do B you cannot have A… and so on.  It will take time for America to go bankrupt, but it will happen if ObamaCare passes and the GOP or Tea Party party does not win a majority in the 2010 elections.

   But even as good an Op Ed that the WSJ editorial wrote on this subject, they did miss the main point.  Which is:  Who Stands to Profit from this Bureaucratic Madness called ObamaCare?

   The best way to answer this question is...   More...

How Big is a Trillion Dollars?
Dec 07, 2009

Washington, DC  –  Whoa, girl friends, gather round, shut up, and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Have you ever seen a million dollars?  How about a billion dollars?  What does One Trillion dollars look like?

   All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"... A billion dollars here... a hundred billion dollars there... Eight hundred billion dollars for President Bush’s TARP bailout... Eight hundred billion dollars for President Obama’s ARRA “stimulus package”… One TRILLION dollars...

   What does that look like?

   Let’s start with a $100 dollar bill, currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation.

   A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000.  Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for a week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

   Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000).  You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

   While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable.  It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

   And $1 BILLION dollars...

   Next let’s look at ONE TRILLION dollars...  More...

Has Congress become an anachronism?
Sep 23, 2009

Did the Founding Fathers make a huge mistake in creating three branches of government instead of just two?  Think about it.  Since we already have the rules spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights regarding our rights and freedoms, what’s really left for Congress to do except to create tons and tons of conflicting special interest legislation that infringes upon our freedoms?

Where did the Founding Fathers go wrong?  Or did they?

Washington, DC – Let’s discuss the basic structure of the government of the United States and – in light of our 2^nd Great Depression and increasing governmental intrusion into the life of the individual -- ask an important question:  namely, has the U.S. Congress morphed into an anachronism?  Has Congress outgrown its original purpose as one of the three “checks and balances” of government?  Specifically, has the U.S. Congress turned into exactly the type of authoritarian and corrupt entity against which we fought a Revolutionary War for Independence in the 1700s?

   Time for a brief History review.  Listen up, girl friends.

   233 years ago, the Founding Fathers of America broke away from a despotic form of government in Britain called a Monarchy and established their own form of government called a limited Republic.  Our Forefathers did not create a Democracy with 51% majority rule.  They created a limited Republic.  What’s the difference?  A Democracy with 51% Majority Rule is the exact antithesis of the concept of inherent individual rights and freedoms.  Inherent means we obtain our rights and freedoms from Nature, not from the government.  Limited means that our Republic is constrained, meaning, it:  (1) prohibits infringements upon individual rights, and (2) confers upon the U.S. Congress certain limited authority to pass legislation by democratic majority rule, as long as said legislation does not infringe upon (1) above.

   And that is the key:  as long as said legislation does not infringe upon our inherent precursor rights.

   These concepts (1) the source of our inherent rights, i.e. Nature not government, and (2) a limited Republic are important to understand:  Congress cannot infringe upon precursor rights of the people that brought about the creation and the very existence of Congress in the first place, and, in the second place, Congress cannot use the limited duties granted to it by the people to infringe upon the explicit or implied provisions of the U.S. Constitution.  In street talk, Congress can’t dump on those who brought it into existence – unless Congress has become Frankenstein but that’s another movie.

   In short, Congress was not created to be our master; Congress is supposed to be our servant, the protector of the rules, the laws, – not enforcer, that’s the job of the Executive and Judicial branches -- governing our inherent rights obtained at birth.  Today, however, Congress has morphed into what could minimally be described as an expensive snotty little brat throwing temper tantrums on the floor of Capitol Hill.  Somebody, I suggest WE the people, needs to collectively spank Congress’ collectivist little butts.

   I digress, but back to the scene of the crime.

   The explicit protections of individual rights are enumerated in, but not limited to, that portion of the U.S. Constitution we call the Bill of Rights.  Protected rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not to be mistaken as the only rights of the individual.  All other rights not specified belong to the individual, not the government.  In fact, Madison and Jefferson were loathe to even create an explicit Bill of Rights since it was clear in their minds that all mutually non-infringing individual rights and freedoms are automatically obtained at birth and do not need to be specified over and over in a Constitution since all rights spring forth from the same philosophical source:  inherent individual freedom.  As Madison said, this would be redundant.  And he was right.  However, many of the states in the 13 colonies had their own Bill of Rights and forced the inclusion of an explicit bill of individual rights in the new U.S. Constitution – fearing a future federal government would stomp on our major freedoms if they were not explicitly stated.  And it appears they were right, too.  Thus, the 13 colonies wouldn’t ratify the new U.S. Constitution and dump the old Articles of Confederation unless it included an explicit Bill of Rights.  Hesto presto, we got a Bill of Rights.

   In addition to protection of individual, not the collective’s, rights, the U.S. Constitution conferred certain limited authorities and duties to the Congress in Article I.  So we have two important areas, based upon two important fundamental concepts, to think about: inherent rights of the individual and specific duties of Congress.

   Fast forward to today, year 2009.

   We now have a U.S. Congress that appears to be totally corrupt, with out-of-control spending, and illegally ceding power to the Executive Branch of government – thus, subverting intra-governmental “checks and balances,” and, even worse, ceding power to a private corporation that controls and manipulates our U.S. Dollar, a private corporation called the Federal Reserve central bank.  As you will see below, Congress has misinterpreted their Constitutional duty to “regulate the value of our COIN, which must be gold or silver, by law” – as the authority to dump their job onto a private central bank.   Unfortunately, this is the root cause of our current Depression and was also the root cause of our first Depression in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

   As a result,  More...

Obama slaps tariff on cheap foreign moonlight
Sep 15, 2009

Washington, DC -- President Barack Obama yesterday slapped a protectionist tariff against the importation of cheap foreign light from the Moon.

   "I will not stand by and allow the importation of cheap foreign moonlight to bankrupt our national electric light bulb industry," said President Obama, as he invoked Federal Tariff Clause 4321 to save Americans from the dumping of free foreign moonlight from the Moon.

   "In the same manner that French Representative of Parliament, Frederic Bastiat, in 1840, urged the Marie Antoinette government in France to ban the cheap importation of sunlight into France with a Petition of the Candle Makers to protect France from unfair competition by the Sun, I am taking the necessary steps to save American industry from unfair foreign traders, to protect American manufacturers of electric light bulbs, U.S. cigarette lighters, North American Halloween torches, Gringo flashlights, and Yankee Doodle safety matches.

   I mean, think about the unfair cost of imported moonlight:  how much more cheap can you get than zero, and how much more foreign can you get than the Moon?  I know, I know, there will be those pig pirate capitalists out there who will claim that a protectionist tariff against the dumping of free foreign moonlight into our economy will encourage a reciprocal trade war.  But, I ask you, what products will those foreigners up on the Moon ban from importation from the U.S.?  Rocket ships and plastic flags?  Not hardly.  Our last three space shuttles have only flown to the Space Station to fix the anti-gravity toilets and, besides, American flags are now made in China.

   Nor do I have to remind you that moonlight is actually sunlight, light that is bounced off the surface of the Moon and redirected on purpose to ruin the U.S. economy.  I suspect it is the Afghanistanis who are behind this sinister economic plot to wreck America's electric light bulb industry by wearing SPF-52 sun block and sunglasses and landing on the Sun not in the extreme heat of the day, but rather in the cool hours of the night, and thus redirecting free foreign sunlight off the Moon and right into our own backyards under the full cover of darkness at night.

   And so, my fellow Americans, I am also directing my new Tariff Erection Czar, Charlie Cialis, to erect faster than Viagra -- for at least four hours at a whack -- a system of mirrors to reflect this unfair importation of cheap foreign moonlight right back into the faces of those Foreign Light Terrorists whose goal is to totally destroy our socialist economy.

   I implore you, what more could you ask for than 24-hour protection against the importation of cheap foreign light, a tariff against sunlight during the day and moonlight during the night?"

   And, while we're at it, let's invoke a 35% tariff against Chinese tires so they can reciprocate with an import tariff on American chickens and auto parts.

Fed Reserve, America’s legal counterfeiting ring
Aug 5, 2009

 “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth.” – Alan Greenspan, published in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1967, and The Objectivist, July 1966

 Boise, ID – Whoa, girl friends, gather ‘round, shut up, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  Before former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan went over to the Dark Side of The Force, namely, Keynesian socialist economics, he was a free market economist who blasted the Welfare State, revealing that the true function of America’s Federal Reserve central bankers is to act as a “legalized” government counterfeiting ring whose “shabby little secret” is to rob the people with clever complicated mechanisms whose series of complex steps involve the member banks issuing and pretending that government bonds, not backed by anything, are treated as if they were an actual deposit of gold, which they are not.

   Read on and have your barf bucket handy.  You’ll need it as you discover that this is exactly what every administration since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913 has been doing, with President Barack Obama’s current administration running its Welfare State on steroids.  Says Alan Greenspan in Ayn Rand’s above-mentioned publications:

   “… But the opposition to the gold standard in any form – from a growing number of welfare-state advocates – was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale… Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.

   The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which – through a complex series of steps – the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold…   More...

GM Bailout Plot Thickens
(Oct 30, 2008)

Washington, DC – Ah ha, the plot thickens in the ongoing saga of GM pretending to buy out Chrysler.

   The CEO of Cerberus LLC is John Snow, former Sec of the U.S. Treasury and alumni of Goldman Sachs investment bank, just like current Sec of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson.  So, John Snow is looking to get taxpayer bailout money for Cerberus's GMAC subprime mortgage slime from alumni buddy Hank Paulson's $700 Billion Bailout Fund or Congress' $25 Billion Electric Car Fund.  Wow, don't the Wall Street bankers know how to feather their own beds and the beds of their Wall Street buddies?

   Read the following news item:  Mon Oct 20  GM to buy Chrysler?  Hmm, let's take a closer looksee at this little boondoggle, shall we?  Here's what's really going on.

   Cerberus LLC owns 80% of Chrysler; Mercedes' Daimler owns the other 20%.  Chrysler has a stash of $11 billion in cash.  Cerberus LLC owns 51% or so of GM, including GM's humongo GMAC car financing and, get this, subprime mortgage debt.

   So, the genius corporate welfare statists at Cerberus LLC have figured out a way to dump GM's GMAC mortgage indebtedness on the American taxpayer:  Cerberus LLC is offering to give Chrysler to GM in exchange for GM giving its GMAC mortgage debt to Cerberus LLC.

   Why would Cerberus LLC exchange Chrysler for GMAC mortgage debt?  Because Cerberus LLC can then get free bailout money from Treasury Sec Hank Paulson's $700 Billion Bailout Booty when Cerberus LLC whines to the government to bail out its GMAC mortgage indebtedness.

   After the Feds bail out Cerberus LLC, then Cerberus will still own 51% or so of GM and -- depending on the deal -- 80% of GM's Chrysler Division AND will have dumped its GMAC toxic mortgages onto the U.S. taxpayers.  Oooh, tricky, tricky.  Cerberus LLC off-loads its toxic GM derivatives -- its GMAC subprime mortgage mess -- onto the American taxpayers while pretending to sell Chrysler to GM.  Wow, what a tricky way to use the government to bail out GM.

   This is not free market capitalism; this is Treasury Sec Paulson's Fascist Business Model at its state interventionist best.  The worst is yet to come.  Welcome to the Pulp Fiction of Keynesian socialist economics and guess what, girl friends, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Cause of financial meltdown is not free market capitalism
(Oct 24, 2008)

Washington, DC –  The current financial meltdown is not an act of, or result of, unregulated free market capitalism.  It is the result of highly regulated central banking -- i.e., going off the gold standard and "legally" monopolizing the issuance of America's medium of economic exchange -- by the government’s national bank, the Federal Reserve.  Same for every nation’s nationalized central bank.

   The Recession is not the result of freedom of choice by the people to establish gold or silver as their medium of economic exchange.  The Recession is the result of a Fascist Business Model of Keynesian socialist economics with non-backed, forced or “fiat” paper currency rammed down the throats of the people.

   Former Fed Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan’s whining before Congress yesterday that he found a “flaw” in free market capitalism that allowed bankers in the mortgage industry to run wild as the cause of the current Recession is just so much bullshit.  Mortgage foreclosures are not The Cause of our current market meltdown but rather just another symptom, an Effect, of The Cause.  The real Cause is hyper-inflation of a non-backed, non-defined, irredeemable U.S. Dollar.

   Greenspan, during his 40 years as Fed Reserve Chief, was never operating in a free market and his continual monetary manipulations, such as lowering interest rates to nearly zero for 3 years, constitute nothing but Keynesian socialist economics.  Greenspan became a Keynesian as soon as he put forth his PhD dissertation on econometrics and thought that he could “manage” the market by the use of differential calculus and historical statistics of past market prices, which is incredibly naive.

   So much for “Maestro” Greenspan’s alleged discovery of a “flaw” in America's non-existent free market capitalism and “confessing” before Henry Waxman’s Congressional Committee of socialist idiots.

   Unfortunately, Greenspan’s pretended allegiance to the free market and “confession” of what he thinks is wrong with free market capitalism will simply serve as more grist for the Keynesian socialists to implement more and more of the same stupid government interventions – mostly more inflation of the money supply – that have brought about our current financial meltdown.

Fed scientists discover new element in Periodic Table of Elements:  Paper
(April 1, 2008)

New York, NY – Whoa, girl friends, pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.

   Scientists at Treasury University and Federal Reserve College have just discovered that the entire Periodic Table of Elements has been wrong – or, at least, missing an important element -- for the last 100 years.  In an astonishing new discovery that continues to shock the world of Chemistry and Physics – as well as Economics – Senior Scientist at U.S. Treasury University, Hank Paulson, and his scientific sidekick Ben Bernanke of Federal Reserve College, miraculously stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling discoveries of the 21^st century:  a missing element in the Periodic Table of Chemical and Physical Elements, which they dub:  Paper.

   Last weekend, while working overtime in  More...

Anybody Seen Our Gold?

(Feb 10, 2008)

From GATA's ad in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Jan 31, 2008

Washington, DC – The gold reserves of the United States have not been fully and independently  audited for half a century.  Now there is proof that those gold reserves and those of other Western nations are being used for the surreptitious manipulation of the international currency, commodity, equity, and bond markets.  More...

Smoke ‘n Mirrors Economic “Stimulus” Package:
$600 for you, $730,000 for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac
(Jan 28, 2008)

Lookie, lookie, in my left hand:  $600, free cookies for everybody.  Yippee for you!

In my right hand:  don’t look, don’t look, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bankruptcies bailed out by raising govt-backed home loan limits from $417,000 to $730,000.  Yippee for the bankers!

It is absolutely insane – and insulting to the American public – for President Bush, the leaders of Congress, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Paulson, and Fed Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke, to proclaim that they have magical powers to change Paper into Gold and that by injecting their Fake Gold into the economy, and convincing consumers to exchange this Paper between each other at the speed of light, they can enrich the economy.

Washington, DC – Has everybody gone insane?

   How can grown men and women – President Bush, Treasury Sec Henry Paulson, Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, and Congress -- stand up before the American people on national TV and proclaim that the issuance of 150 billion pieces of green Govt Paper – not backed by anything, not a promissory note, not collateralized by anything but thin air – can somehow magically obtain value by the mere act of printing and distributing it?  More...

The Paper Chase:
Dollar becomes pulp fiction as Fed injects trillions into the market…
But Dollar is not real capital, thus cannot stimulate the economy
(Jan 24, 2008)

The fallacy of the Federal Reserve pretending to “stimulate” the economy by injecting billions of non-backed Dollars into the market is:  Dollars are not “real capital” or “capital goods.”  The truth is that the Fed is merely injecting billions of pieces of little green paper printed up out of thin air.  The only result will be more inflation and unemployment.

What the economy needs is an injection of real capital, not fake money.  But only true entrepreneurs through a free market economy can bring capital to the market.  Central bankers do not possess capital.  They only possess non-backed paper.

What is truly needed is laissez-faire free market capitalism with real entrepreneurs injecting real capital, not a government-sanctioned group of private central bankers (the Federal Reserve) and their special interest groups hyper-inflating the U.S. economy with tons of pulp fiction.

Washington, DC – Listen up girl friends.  Pour yourself another hot cup of Rocket Java, pull up the floor, and have a seat.  Have you ever pondered the following important economic question, let’s say, during foreplay on a hot Friday night with Mr. Right, or whilst leisurely munching on a chocolate truffle in your big bubble bath overflowing with suds from The Body Shoppe?

   Really?  I’m shocked.

   OK, here’s the question:  When the Federal Reserve injects billions of dollars into the economy, what is it injecting:  only “paper” or “real capital?”  More...

Federal Reserve drives U.S. into Super Recession, then Depression, then Martial Law
(Jan 19, 2008)

Not one member of the Federal Reserve -- or 99% of today’s PhD economists or stock market pundits -- can correctly answer the following basic questions in economics:

(1) What is the difference between money and a paper receipt for money?

(2) From where, exactly, does the non-backed U.S. Dollar obtain its value?

 (3) What is the difference between today’s U.S. Dollar and “real capital?”

Therefore, not knowing the answers to these three basic questions, the Federal Reserve erroneously continues to inject trillions of worthless, non-backed Monopoly Money into the banking system, under the false assumptions that (1) green paper printed on a U.S. Treasury printing press magically obtains “value,” (2) the non-backed U.S. dollar is the same as “real capital” and, (3) consumers rapidly spending trillions and trillions of newly injected National Wallpaper can somehow “stimulate” the enrichment of our economy.

The real purpose of a federal “monetary stimulus” package is for the Federal Reserve to bail out their billionaire buddies in banking and pass the monetary inflation on to the taxpayers in the form of higher prices for all commodities and services.

Washington, DC – Turn on the TV, girl friends, and all you hear these days are arguments about how much money the Federal Reserve central bankers should inject into the U.S. economy.  Nobody bothers to ask whether a central bank should inject trillions of dollars into the economy, or whether a central bank should even exist.  Everybody simply assumes that the Federal Reserve should exist, and should pump money into the market; their only questions are:  how much, and by what method?

   But wait.  More...

U.S. Federal Reserve Note:  America’s Pulp Fiction
(Jan 01, 2008)

Once you change the contractual concept of paper money from a redeemable, exchangeable promissory note to an irredeemable exchange-only note, you will have established a precedent for the destruction of all future economic contracts.

America’s “bundled” subprime mortgage slime and every nation’s Sovereign Wealth Funds are direct results of America’s new Pulp Fiction: the Federal Reserve Note.

Washington, DC – What’s the difference between today’s Federal Reserve Note (our U.S. Dollar), “bundled” subprime SIVs (Structured Investment Vehicles), and Sovereign Wealth Funds?

   The answer:  nothing.

   All three rest upon the ridiculous concept that pieces of paper, in and of themselves, obtain value by virtue of the fact that they’re  More...

Goldman Sachs creates subprime slime with left hand, shorts subprime slime with right hand
(Dec 18, 2007)

Conflict of interest?

New York, NY – According to the WSJ, Goldman Sachs mortgage department was a major underwriter of complex bundled securities of subprime mortgages.  When those securities plunged in value this year, Goldman's customers suffered major losses, as did units within Goldman's banking and investment group.

   However, simultaneously down the hall, Goldman was busy "shorting" billions of dollars of these same subprime slime securities, betting that their value would fall.  The big question is:  how could Goldman legally peddle subprime slime to their customers while their own traders were busy betting that bundled subprimes would collapse?  If this isn't a conflict of interest, then what is?  More...

Let's Get Back to the U.S. Constitution
----------
Holy moley, look how fast America is going bankrupt: (click on the puddy tat)

      National News      

Martial Law By Executive Order

by Jim Garrison, The Huff Post

(Apr 30, 2012)

The most important thing to glean from this article is not so much what it says but that it was published in the left Liberal Huffington Post.  You know that when the left Liberals finally discover that President Obama is Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, and that Obama is serious about dumping the US Constitution and making himself Dictator of America, then we are in real trouble.

Martial Law By Executive Order is the final step of the philosophy of altruistic state collectivism.  First you convince everybody that they have a "right" to receive the property of everybody else based upon real or imagined "NEEDs."  That's the altruism phase.  Second, you obtain the sanction of your victims.  That's the feeling guilty phase if you don't give it all up in all the various taxation and redistributionist schemes concocted by the government.  The third step is Martial Law By Executive Order.  That's when the government takes over, all in the name of national security.  And the final phase will be, of course, The Holocaust for all those who have finally figured out that they've been lied to and are suspected of trying to resist the government's martial law.

Why has it taken so long for the Liberals at the Huffington Post to finally figure out what's going on?  Remember that the difference between left Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians is:  Libertarians think in terms of logical, objective, philosophical principles and apply them to all sectors of life, social and economic; Conservatives think in terms of some principles and apply some of their principles to economics but rarely to social issues; left Liberals think in terms of disconnected thought globs, no principles, and have to re-think every single issue, social and economic, as if there were no step by step logical connection between individual social freedoms and individual economic freedoms.  Liberals find out about The Holocaust only after living it, and even then they can't figure out how they got there; Libertarians already know that altruistic state collectivism inexorably must lead to The Holocaust.  Unless we stop both major political parties who are busy implementing altruistic state collectivism, we will all soon be living in The Hunger Games.  I wonder how many Liberals have figured that out, yet: The Hunger Games?

Washington, DC -- President Obama's National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of March 16 does to the country as a whole what the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act did to the Constitution in particular -- completely eviscerates any due process or judicial oversight for any action by the Government deemed in the interest of "national security." Like the NDAA, the new Executive Order puts the government completely above the law, which, in a democracy, is never supposed to happen. The United States is essentially now under martial law without the exigencies of a national emergency.

Even as the 2012 NDAA was rooted in the Patriot Act and the various executive orders and Congressional bills that ensued to broaden executive power in the "war on terror," so the new Executive Order is rooted in the Defense Production Act of 1950 which gave the Government powers to mobilize national resources in the event of national emergencies, except now virtually every aspect of American life falls under ultimate unchallengeable government control, to be exercised by the president and his secretaries at their discretion.

The 2012 NDAA deemed the United States a "battlefield," as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, and gave the president and his agents the right to seize and arrest any U.S. citizen, detain them indefinitely without charge or trial, and do so only on suspicion, without any judicial oversight or due process. The new Executive Order states that the president and his secretaries have the authority to commandeer all U.S. domestic resources, including food and water, as well as seize all energy and transportation infrastructure inside the borders of the United States. The Government can also forcibly draft U.S. citizens into the military and force U.S. citizens to fulfill "labor requirements" for the purposes of "national defense." There is not even any Congressional oversight allowed, only briefings.

In the NDAA, only the president had the authority to abrogate legitimate freedoms of U.S. citizens. What is extraordinary in the new Executive Order is that this supreme power is designated through the president to the secretaries that run the Government itself:

• The Secretary of Defense has power over all water resources;
• The Secretary of Commerce has power over all material services and facilities, including construction materials;
• The Secretary of Transportation has power over all forms of civilian transportation;
• The Secretary of Agriculture has power over food resources and facilities, livestock plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment;
• The Secretary of Health and Human Services has power over all health resources;
• The Secretary of Energy has power over all forms of energy.

The Executive Order even stipulates that in the event of conflict between the secretaries in using these powers, the president will determine the resolution through his national security team.

The 2012 NDAA gave the Government the right to abrogate any due process against a U.S. citizen. The new Executive Order gives the government, through the Secretary of Labor, the right to proactively...  More...

President Obama, "Tax the Rich!"

(Apr 18, 2012)

Washington, DC -- Yahoo, girl friends, let's tax the rich!

That's what our socialist President Barack Obama is now shouting from the roof tops all across America in his never-ending campaign speeches for the presidency for 2012.

Just what we need:  a good social-political-economic screwing over for another 4 years by somebody who defines himself and his fascist cronies as the free market.

There are two major problems with President Obama's Kantian and Marxist philosophies:

(1) In spite of what Obama is preaching, It is not wrong or immoral for individuals to accumulate riches, which in economic terms is called savings, or excess capital saved from production.  For all you farmers out there, it's called seed corn, and

(2) Marxist socialism does not work.

As to the first, it is a philosophical (I do not mean theoretical, I mean real for survival) question:  do individuals have the moral right to accumulate capital (riches) in a free market, yes or no?  And if they do, why is it morally OK?  Further, if it is not wrong, by what authority does the President of the United States claim to have a right to redistribute anybody's accumulated wealth, or seed corn?

In a limited Republic based upon inherent individual private property rights, it is not only moral to accumulate savings, it is immoral and stupid to NOT accumulate savings.  In fact, in modern society, if we don't accumulate true capital -- real commodities, not the fake paper of Federal Reserve Notes -- we will die as soon as the food, water, and medicine run out.  Humans have an inherent right to save seed corn and other commodities for their future survival.

Taxing the rich is a very stupid idea since they are the golden geese who have saved enough capital to produce more goods and services and hire individuals to work.  Corporate managers and their employees are both capitalists and their relationship is not a dichotomy working against each other as Karl Marx would have us believe.  Capitalists, hourly-wage employees, and consultants all work together voluntarily in a free market for a common purpose:  survival and expanded quality of life.

What Obama and his socialist cronies are trying to promulgate is nothing short of the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist philosophy that there is no objective reality, that man qua an individual cannot know anything about the real world around him, that man the non-individual only obtains his "rights" to survival from the biggest and baddest collective group (whoever happens to be in charge of the government at any given moment), and, therefore, there is no such thing as individual rights, all individuals must live and respond to the needs of a collective group, and the best social-political-economic method to accomplish this contradictory philosophy is Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.

Buzz, wrong again, President Obama.

On all accounts.  Kant and Hegel destroyed the concept of individualism while Marx and Engels destroyed the only moral result of individual rights: free market capitalism.

The adoption of our modern day philosophers' claptrap who have been drooling all over the writings of Emanuel Kant and Karl Marx is now coming full circle and...  More...

Complexity is Bad for your Health

Editorial WSJ

(Apr 09, 2012)

Washington, DC -- The Supreme Court has long had the role of declaring what the law is. That's becoming a harder and harder task thanks to the White House and Congress concocting laws so complex that no one knows their meaning before, during or after they're passed.

In an era when people expect transparency and abhor complexity, three days of skeptical Supreme Court hearings on the president's health law showcased a complex law collapsing under its own weight. Information is supposed to flow freely, but consumers of health care operate in the dark, including without any understanding of how the law is supposed to work. And they are not alone.

Consider how Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer—one Reagan appointee and one Clinton appointee—tag-teamed to declare the law unreadable. "What happened to the Eighth Amendment?" Justice Scalia asked during the oral argument, referring to prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. "You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? And do you really expect the court to do that? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?"

Justice Breyer made a similar point: "I haven't read every word of that, I promise. . . . There is the mandate in the community, this is Titles I and II, the mandate, the community, pre-existing condition, OK? . . . There is biosimilarity, there is breast-feeding, there is promoting nurses and doctors to serve underserved areas, there is the Class Act, etc. . . . So what do you propose we do other than spend a year reading all this?"

The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law's great length and complexity?

This shouldn't surprise even supporters of the law. Before the bill was passed in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it," and Rep. John Conyers complained, "What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means?"

Having his legislation treated as farce may help explain President Obama's attack on the courts at a news conference last week. He claimed...  More...

      Local News      

Idaho’s WinderCare Tramples Upon Women’s Private Property Rights

(Mar 26, 2012)

Boise, ID -- The Idaho Senate last week trampled upon all individuals’ rights when it passed WinderCare, a mandate introduced into the legislature by Senator Chuck Winder that would force women to undergo an ultra-sound test before having an abortion.

The first right stomped upon is the pregnant woman’s right to choose whether to have an ultra-sound.

The second right stomped upon is the woman’s doctor, forced by the state to order an ultra-sound.

Like ObamaCare, which mandates that all citizens must purchase a commodity as a condition of existence, of being a US citizen, WinderCare would mandate a woman and her doctor to perform an ultra-sound procedure as a condition for a possible future – and legal -- medical procedure.

Referring to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from coercion in person, papers, and effects, WinderCare – like ObamaCare -- is an obvious violation of an individual’s rights on many levels.

First, WinderCare violates a woman’s 4^th Amendment right to habeus corpus, a long-standing writ in British and American law to be free from false imprisonment by either the government or others.  Imprisonment does not only mean to be physically locked up and thrown into jail.  It also refers to illegal detainment or the taking away an individual’s freedom to act, travel, speak, or freedom of exchange in the market.

Under WinderCare, a woman cannot choose to have an abortion unless she first undergoes a government-mandated action of a vaginal or abdominal ultra-sound, thus violating her right to a future voluntary legal procedure with her doctor: an abortion.  Abortions are legal in Idaho.  WinderCare is tantamount to forcing an individual to undergo one procedure in order to perform a second, legal procedure.  

What is WinderCare really trying to do?

It is an obvious punitive action by Senator Chuck Winder – via the State -- to try to coerce a woman to do something – view an ultra-sound of her fetus – in order to coerce her to not do something else – an abortion -- that is already perfectly legal to do.  Punitive action against abortions in Idaho already takes the form of forcing pregnant women contemplating abortion to sign off on a piece of paper that purports to show how an abortion can result in cancer – thanks to a previous pernicious piece of paper introduced and passed in the Idaho legislature by Rep Bill Sali some years ago.

If Senator Winder wants to question the issue of abortion, let him introduce legislation to try that on its own merits.  But introducing legislation mandating...  More...

      National News      

Liberty and ObamaCare

by

WSJ editorial

(Mar 23, 2012)

The Affordable Care Act claims federal power is unlimited. Now the High Court must decide.

Washington, DC -- Few legal cases in the modern era are as consequential, or as defining, as the challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court hears beginning Monday. The powers that the Obama Administration is claiming change the structure of the American government as it has existed for 225 years. Thus has the health-care law provoked an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional showdown that endangers individual liberty.

It is a remarkable moment. The High Court has scheduled the longest oral arguments in nearly a half-century: five and a half hours, spread over three days. Yet Democrats, the liberal legal establishment and the press corps spent most of 2010 and 2011 deriding the government of limited and enumerated powers of Article I as a quaint artifact of the 18th century. Now even President Obama and his staff seem to grasp their constitutional gamble.

Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. "Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned," the memo notes, rather than "the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic]." Those nonpolitical details are merely what "lawyers will be talking about."

The White House is even organizing demonstrations during the proceedings, including a "'prayerful witness' encircling the Supreme Court." The executive branch is supposed to speak to the Court through the Solicitor General, not agitprop and crowds in the streets.

The Supreme Court will not be ruling about matters of partisan conviction, or the President's re-election campaign, or even about health care at all. The lawsuit filed by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business is about...  More...

ObamaCare's Flawed Economic Foundations

by

Prof. Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Vernon L. Smith, for the WSJ

(Mar 20, 2012)

The insurance mandate has almost nothing to do with remedying costs imposed on the system by those without coverage.

Washington, DC -- ObamaCare will be argued next week in the Supreme Court. While the justices will consider the intricacies of constitutional law, at their heart the arguments in favor of the legislation have to do with the economics of health care.

Consider the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The Obama administration defends the mandate on the ground that a person's decision to not buy health insurance affects commerce by materially increasing the costs of others' health insurance. The government adds that health care is unique and therefore can be regulated constitutionally in ways other markets cannot.

In reality, the mandate has almost nothing to do with cost-shifting. The targeted population—the young, healthy and not poor who choose to forgo coverage—has a minimal role in the $43 billion of uncompensated health-care costs. In 2008, for example (the latest figures available), the Department of Health and Human Service's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey showed that the uncompensated care of the mandate's targeted population was no more than $12.8 billion—a tiny one-half of 1% of the nation's $2.4 trillion in overall health-care costs. The insurance mandate cannot reasonably be justified on the ground that it remedies costs imposed on the system by the voluntarily uninsured.

The government's other defense is that the health-care market does not exhibit textbook competition. No market does. The economic features relied upon by the government—externalities, imperfect information, geographically distinct markets, etc.—are characteristic of many markets.

The presence of externalities and other market imperfections does not justify a departure from the normal rules of the constitutional road. Health care is typically consumed locally, and health-insurance markets themselves primarily operate within the states. The administration's attempt to fashion a singular, universal solution is not necessary to deal with the variegated issues arising in these markets. States have taken the lead in past reform efforts. They should be an integral part of improving the functioning of health-care and health-insurance markets.

Consider also the health law's expansion of Medicaid. As Prof. Richard Epstein argued on these pages ("ObamaCare's Phony Medicaid 'Deal,'" May 10, 2010), an expenditure of federal funds is unconstitutional when it coerces states rather than encouraging them to participate in a federal policy. And coercion is the essence of ObamaCare's Medicaid provisions.

ObamaCare transforms Medicaid from a health-care program for impoverished and special-needs groups such as the disabled, into a mandatory federal entitlement—effectively obligatory on both the states and beneficiaries alike—that reaches even working adults whose incomes fall well above the poverty level.

The states are in no realistic position to say no. Consider what would happen if the states...  More...

The Education Games

(Mar 12, 2012)

Washington, DC -- Welcome to The Education Games.  Like Susanne Collins' new book The Hunger Games, America is now hosting The Education Games.  How does that work?

   The setting is today, the Greatest Recession in North America since 1933.  Nobody is employed.  Nobody is allowed to trade, except with The District, and everybody is busy blaming everybody else for their government-created predicament.

   Those in charge live in The District of Columbia, i.e. Washington DC.  The District controls everything and everybody.  The District has inflated the paper currency, the dollar, into oblivion.  It's not worth shit.  The District has caused a third of Americans to lose the value of their homes, crashed all aspects of the economy, and created massive unemployment all across what was once a prosperous nation called the United States of America.

   America is now called The Circus, short for the old Roman term: Bread and Circuses, which refers to exactly what The District is now doing to Americans:  feeding them a lot of Government Cookies (the Bread) to keep them fat, dumb, happy and continually slurping down government-mandated, nationalized, unhealthy health pills.

   The purpose of The Education Games is not to educate but to keep all the unemployed busy running around in the District's Education Folly Maze, a giant Circus of pretended education.

   Since a third of Americans have no job, and are not likely to get one since all jobs and the Free Market have been outlawed by The District, they are paid by The District to Race To The Top.  Race To The Top is President Barack Obama's version of former President George Bush's Leave No Child Behind.  Both federal programs have one objective:  to keep the masses in a perpetual state of re-educating themselves to earn a different State Work Permit so they can pretend to look for the same type of job that someone else is busy re-educating themselves out of -- so that they, too, can pretend to be looking for a different job that has also been prohibited by The District.

   Meanwhile, everybody collects government unemployment Cookies.

   Forever.

   Forever because there is no end to The Education Games.  It's a big...  More...

The Hunger Games

(Mar 05, 2012)

Washington, DC -- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  That's the book you want to read today.

   Actually, The Hunger Games book series is a trilogy:  (1) The Hunger Games, (2) Catching Fire, and (3) Mockingjay.

   Why should you read The Hunger Games?  Because at the current rate of our approaching economic Depression in America, and if president Obama and his fascist cronies win the 2012 Elections, we may all end up as participants in a national fight to the death for what remains of the food supply in North America.

   In Suzanne Collins' 1st book of her trilogy, North America -- which is now called Panem -- has totally collapsed into 12 major Districts, ruled by a Capitol Dictator and an army of Peacekeepers reminiscent of Darth Vader's killer-diller super soldiers who stop at nothing to keep the people in each District towing the line.

   Each District is surrounded by electric barbed-wire fencing and must produce whatever the Capitol tells it to produce: mining, agriculture, etc.  If you stray outside the fence or don't produce for the Capitol, you are dead meat.  Most Districts are barely subsisting.  No food, no medicine, no nothing but bare living essentials.  Residents of the Capitol live like Kings and Queens.

   So what's the plot?  Every year the Capitol holds The Hunger Games.  Each District must send two youths, one boy and one girl, between the ages of 12 and 18, to participate in a national televised fight to the death in a huge landscaped arena with only one winner.  The winner is allowed to live in comfort for the rest of his or her life and the winner's District receives extra food on a monthly basis for a year.  Participants in The Hunger Games are chosen by a lottery, names pulled out of a jar.  Good luck.

   The Gamekeeper who officially runs the Hunger Games is a tricky sucker who...  More...

Feds Redefine Pizza as a Vegetable

(Feb 24, 2012)

Washington, DC -- Whoa, jump off your ponies, pull up the barn floor, shut up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.  The federal government wants to redefine a pizza as a vegetable.  Uh-huh.  A vegetable.

That reminds me of a satirical article in The Onion a few years back in which a vegetarian group redefined cows as plants so the vegans could gobble down hamburgers and steaks.  Chickens became legumes, fish became seaweed, and so on.

So, what's the beef about today's Department of Education and US Department of Agriculture wanting to redefine a pizza in our public schools lunch program as a vegetable?  How do the bureaucrats plan to alter reality for the kids?

Simple.  Add more marinara tomato sauce to the public school pizzas, thus pretending a pizza is actually a tomato, and redefine a pizza as a vegetable.  That way, kids won't get fat.

As an aside, a tomato is not a vegetable; it is a fruit.  So, not only are the USDA and Dept of Education bureaucrats IGNORANT about the biological category of a tomato, they are now trying to destroy basic reality (metaphysics and epistemology) of the real world.

As Aristotle taught thousands of years ago, A equals A, and A cannot also equal B at the same time.  That's a given.  Otherwise, nobody could define reality and establish categories of thought in order to survive in the real world.

Then, with no true categories of thought, nobody could establish a "self," thus self identity, or self esteem.  Nobody could define what's good or bad for survival of the individual -- or humanity -- in the real world.  Nobody could establish a moral right and wrong.  What's good for me, what's bad for me?  What's good for my family, what's good for homo sapiens on planet Earth and in the Universe?

Finally, with no moral philosophy as a guide,...  More...

2012: The Obama-Romney Presidential Debates

(Feb 06, 2012)

Washington, DC -- Fast forward to Nov 2012:  The Obama-Romney Presidential Debates.

How can GOP candidate Mitt Romney debate Barack Obama on the issue of universal health care?  Obama will point out that Gov. Romney implemented the president’s same socialized health care plan, ObamaCare, as Romney Care in Massachusetts.

Gov. Romney will then try to counter by saying that Romney Care is OK at the state level but not OK at the national level.  It’s OK, says Romney, for the state of Massachusetts and each of the other 49 states to strip the individual of their rights to choose any commodity or service pushed by the government but it’s not OK for the federal government to do the same thing to all 50 states.

Obama will counter, why not?  Allowing each state to mandate government health care is extremely inefficient and people moving from one state to another will have to keep changing to the different health care rules of each state.  It’s more efficient for all 50 states to have one nationalized health care program instead of having to obtain a new plan every time they move from one state to another.

Legally, points out Obama, if it’s constitutional to mandate government health care per state, it’s OK to...  More...

The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe

by Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr.
The Wall Street Journal

(Dec 28, 2011)

When is a loan between central banks not a loan? When it is a dollars-for-euros currency swap.

Dallas, TX -- America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.

The Fed is using what is termed a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement" with the European Central Bank (ECB). There are similar arrangements with the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan. Simply put, the Fed trades or "swaps" dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.

Why are the Fed and the ECB doing this? The Fed could, after all, lend directly to U.S. branches of foreign banks. It did a great deal of lending to foreign banks under various special credit facilities in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse in the fall of 2008. Or, the ECB could lend euros to banks and they could purchase dollars in foreign-exchange markets. The world is, after all, awash in dollars.

The two central banks are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.

The ECB is entangled in an even bigger legal and political mess. What the heads of many European governments want is for the ECB to bail them out. The central bank and some European governments say that it cannot constitutionally do that. The ECB would also prefer not to create boatloads of new euros, since it wants to keep its reputation as an inflation-fighter intact. To mitigate its euro lending, it borrows dollars to...  More...

      International News      

Forget Britain's David Cameron Veto, Another Eurozone Crisis is Only Weeks Away

by Jeremy Warner
The Telegraph

(Dec 13, 2011)

Leaders in the European Union will not take the measures towards fiscal union that would save their ailing economies.

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, remains intransigent. ... What he has agreed to do is provide unlimited liquidity to banks, so that they could in theory buy up sovereign bonds instead.  But even if this were to happen, it couldn’t provide a lasting solution. European banks are already bust enough; to exaggerate the problem by loading themselves up with junk sovereign debt is scarcely going to help. As for Germany, hell will freeze over before it accepts joint liability for periphery debts.

There was no fiscal compact of any significance agreed last weekend.  Nor was there any progress made in providing a credible backstop. Even with the extra funds which European leaders are laughably promising via the IMF “back door” (as if they cannot trust themselves with their own money), the financial firewall remains dwarfed by the ever-growing size of the problem. Italy’s funding needs would gobble up the entire bail-out money within two years. In any case, the IMF back-door support is already in trouble. There’s no clarity on where the extra 200 billion euros are going to come from, with the Bundesbank refusing to cough up unless underwritten by the German parliament and confusion over whether non-euro countries are expected to contribute.

If you really want to understand the bankrupt moral philosophy of altruistic collectivism behind what is going on in the European Union today -- as well as in the United States -- I could simply ask you to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or see the movie.  That way, you can also "see" what the obvious result will be.  The question, "Who is John Galt?" will soon be answered in Europe and the US. -- FM Duck

London, England -- You wouldn’t believe it to listen to the fulminating indignation directed at the UK from across the Channel, but David Cameron did the eurozone’s political leaders a favour last weekend. By refusing to sign up, he managed to create a convenient Aunt Sally for Europeans to throw stones at, and divert attention from the summit’s failure to come up with anything remotely credible to address either the single currency’s existential crisis or the gathering economic slump. The latest in a long line of self-styled “make or break” summits, it was in truth no more momentous than any of the others.

What was agreed was some minor strengthening of the Maastricht framework for governing monetary union, though some aspects of the original “stability and growth pact” have actually been watered down. The maximum fine that can be imposed for breach of the rules has been reduced from 0.5 per cent of GDP annually to 0.2 per cent.

In most other respects too, the idea that some kind of great leap forward in terms of fiscal and political union has occurred is a nonsense. Consider...  More...

      National News      

How Does Europe Borrow Dollars from the Fed?

by John Carney
at CNBC

(Dec 11, 2011)

New York, NY -- The Federal Reserve and other banks announced Wednesday that they were engaging in a coordinated action to provide liquidity to Europe's credit markets.

What essentially happened is that the Fed cut the interest rate it charges the European Central Bank to borrow dollars.

The European Central Bank wants the dollars so it can lend them out to European banks, which have been having trouble borrowing dollars at affordable rates due to fears about their financial health.

It’s worth taking a moment to see what actually happens with these swap facilities because they can create the illusion we’re sending boatloads of dollars overseas and the ECB is sending us boatloads full of euros.

Would-be pirates will be disappointed that no currency flotillas cross back and forth on the Atlantic.

What really takes place, for the most part, is down on Maiden Lane in Manhattan’s financial district. That’s where the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is located.

Like most interbank transfers these days, everything is done electronically.

When the ECB wants dollars, it gives notice to the New York Fed. The notice contains how many dollars the ECB wants, when it wants them, what the exchange rate is at the time, when it will pay back the dollars, and what the interest rate will be.

Until today, the interest rate was one percent plus something called the US dollar Overnight Indexed Swap Rate. Today's announcement cut the spread in half, so that the ECB now borrows at just half a percent over the OIS. (It’s very telling that only the ECB has to pay interest. There’s no price for the Fed getting to hold euros.)

Next—and this is important—nothing happens. Not really, that is.

Nothing moves anywhere. No currency flotillas leave for the high seas.

All that happens is that an account at the NY Fed that the ECB has designated as its swap account gets credited with the dollars. This account is really just a line on a spreadsheet in a computer in that Fed building on Maiden Lane. Crediting the account just means that someone enters numbers into a spreadsheet.

At the same time, the ECB enters numbers onto a spreadsheet...  More...

Fix Was In: The Stock Market was Rigged

by John Crudele
at The New York Post

(Dec 08, 2011)

New York, NY -- So, now do you believe me? The stock market was rigged.

It has been a little lonely telling this story over the past few years.

But now that another news organization has finally gotten off its lazy butt, I’ll tell it again: Under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, confidential government information was regularly leaked to select people on Wall Street.

As I’ve explained many times before, The Post got hold of Paulson’s telephone records back in 2009. And the phone logs show that Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, regularly spoke with influential people on Wall Street with whom he shouldn’t have been communicating. These phone calls could have been — let’s use the word “enriching” — for the recipients.

Among his regular phone buds was Lloyd Blankfein, who, for example, spoke six times with Paulson on Sept. 18, 2008. That was a day of great market turmoil and — while there is no way of knowing what the two men spoke about — the calls did coincide with a major turnaround in stock prices.

That was just one example.

There were many recipients of Paulson’s calls. And the conversations went on for years and were especially frequent when...  More...

European Ponzi Goes Full Retard as EFSF Found to Monetize... Itself

by Tyler Durden
at Zero Hedge

(Nov 15, 2011)

Washington, DC -- We have long mocked and ridiculed the Federal Reserve for being the ultimate Ponzi instrument: after all, why worry, when your central bank will buy up almost three trillion in US paper in about 2 years (a very comforting fact for US politicians who never have to fear that those trillions in new porkbills, pardon fiscal stimulus programs, may end up without funding).

Well, as it turns out, those wily veteran bankers from across the Atlantic have just one-upped America yet again.

According to the Telegraph, the abysmal, and barely successful, 3 EUR billion issuance of EFSF bonds (which was originally supposed to be 10 EUR billion, on its very very gradual climb to 1 EUR trillion) had one more very curious feature to it, aside from confirming that it is Dead On Arrival as expected.  It turns out that in addition to being the most convoluted and complex creation ever conceived by JP Morgan which is advising Europe on coming up with structured finance products that are so complex nobody will ask any questions and will automatically assume someone else has done the homework, it is also the quintessential Ponzi instrument.

The Telegraph reports that the already reduced 3 EUR billion "target was only met after the EFSF resorted to buying up several hundred million euros worth of the bonds." You read that right: in its first bond issuance since its transformation to the European Bank/Sovereign Bailout Swiss Army Knife, the EFSF not only failed to raise a minimum token amount, but also had to... buy its own bonds. We can assume that the money the EFSF needed to fund said purchase came from the money growing tree, as at last check the European Central Bank was still not funding the EFSF with crisp, new zEURq.PK equivalent binary 1s and 0s. But at least we all know what happens when the global Ponzi goes full retard.

More on this surreal story which will be promptly buried in the barrage of Monday headlines because an international advisor to Goldman Sachs is now in charge of Italy.

Sources said the EFSF had spent more than 100 Million Euros buying...  More...

Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid

by Andrew G. Biggs & Jason Richwine
Wall Street Journal

(Nov 09, 2011)

Washington, DC -- A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."

Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.

How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.

While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.

Data on employee benefits from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, do not include retiree health coverage, which for teachers is worth about an additional 10% of their salaries. Because of differing accounting rules between the public and private sectors, BLS data also make teachers' defined-benefit pensions appear only slightly more generous than the typical 401(k) plan found in the private sector.

In reality, a teacher who retired after 30 years of service with an annual salary of $40,000 might receive guaranteed annual pension benefits of about $20,330. Under a typical private 401(k) plan, a guaranteed annual benefit might be only around $4,450 (assuming the money is invested in U.S. Treasurys and the employee buys an annuity).

BLS data on paid leave for teachers count vacation days only during the school year, omitting summer and long holiday breaks. A valid pay comparison should include this extra time off, in which teachers can enjoy longer vacations or earn additional income.

Properly counted, a typical public school teacher with a salary of $51,000 would receive another $51,480 in present or future fringe benefits. A worker in private business with the same salary would receive around $22,185 in fringe benefits.

Finally, despite recent layoffs, teachers still have greater job security...  More...

Hell Explained by a Chemistry Student

by Your Humble Servant

(Nov 04, 2011)

Phoenix, AZ -- The following is an actual question given on a University of Arizona chemistry midterm, and an actual answer turned in by a student.

The answer by this student was so 'profound' that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time.  So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely.  I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.  Therefore, no souls are leaving.  As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.  Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.  With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.  Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:   More...

      International News      

Understanding Derivatives and The Bailout

by Your Humble Servant

(Oct 25, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.

To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern because he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These "securities" then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold...  More...

The European Crisis

by Vedran Vuk

(Sep 15, 2011)

Washington, DC -- In many ways, the European crisis is more than just a financial event; it's the death of the argument for a European-style welfare state. This topic hasn't been discussed much in the media, but as the crisis gets worse, this realization should become more apparent to others.

From justifying universal healthcare to unions, to public housing, Europe has been the poster boy in American politics. "If Europeans can do it, so can we" has been the rallying motto. Unfortunately for the Left in particular, this argument is becoming less sensible by the day. With overspending as the root cause of Europe's troubles, only a fool would suggest the same policies here.

In the US, the 2008 crisis has been called the "subprime crisis," and for good reason. The main problem was injecting too much money into the system and causing an unsustainable bubble. Unfortunately, many US and international banks were holding these inflated junk mortgages and toxic assets - hence our current predicament. If anyone was to blame, it was the world's central banks - particularly the Federal Reserve.

However, the current European crisis is much different. The problems of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are very clear. There are no...  More...

      National News      

Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later

by Rep Ron Paul

(Jul 24, 2011)

Washington, DC -- Debate over the debt ceiling has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, with each side trying to outdo the other in a game of political chicken. If you believe some of the things that are being written, the world will come to an end if the U.S. defaults on even the tiniest portion of its debt.

In strict terms, the default being discussed will occur if the U.S. fails to meet its debt obligations, through failure to pay either interest or principal due a bondholder. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling claim that a default on Aug. 2 is unprecedented and will result in calamity (never mind that this is simply an arbitrary date, easily changed, marking a congressional recess). My expectations of such a scenario are more sanguine.

The U.S. government defaulted at least three times on its obligations during the 20th century.

-- In 1934, the government banned ownership of gold and eliminated the right to exchange gold certificates for gold coins. It then immediately revalued gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35, thus devaluing the dollar holdings of all Americans by 40 percent.

-- From 1934 to 1968, the federal government continued to issue and redeem silver certificates, notes that circulated as legal tender that could be redeemed for silver coins or silver bars. In 1968, Congress unilaterally reneged on this obligation, too.

-- From 1934 to 1971, foreign governments were permitted by the U.S. government to exchange their dollars for gold through the gold window. In 1971, President Richard Nixon severed this final link between the dollar and gold by closing the gold window, thus in effect defaulting once again on a debt obligation of the U.S. government.

Unlimited Spending

No longer constrained by any sort of commodity backing, the federal government was now free to engage in almost unlimited fiscal profligacy, the only check on its spending being the market’s appetite for Treasury debt. Despite the defaults in 1934, 1968 and 1971, world markets have been only too willing to purchase Treasury debt and thereby fund the government’s deficit spending. If these major defaults didn’t result in decreased investor appetite for U.S. obligations, I see no reason why defaulting on a small amount of debt this August would cause any major changes.

The national debt now stands at just over $14 trillion, while net total liabilities are estimated at over $200 trillion. The government is insolvent, as there is no way that this massive sum of liabilities can ever be paid off. Successive Congresses and administrations have shown absolutely no restraint when it comes to the budget process, and the idea that either of the two parties is serious about getting our fiscal house in order is laughable.

Boom and Bust

The Austrian School’s theory of the business cycle describes how loose central bank monetary policy causes booms and busts: It drives down interest rates below the market rate, lowering the cost of borrowing; encourages malinvestment; and causes economic miscalculation as resources are diverted from the highest value use as reflected in true consumer preferences. Loose monetary policy caused the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, and now is causing the government debt bubble.

For far too long, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and quantitative easing have kept interest rates artificially low, enabling the government to drastically increase its spending by funding its profligacy through new debt whose service costs were lower than they otherwise would have been.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats sought to end this gravy train, with one party prioritizing war spending and the other prioritizing welfare spending, and with both supporting both types of spending. But now, with the end of the second round of quantitative easing, the federal funds rate at the zero bound, and the debt limit maxed out, Congress finds itself in a real quandary.

Hard Decisions

It isn’t too late to return to fiscal sanity. We could start by canceling out the debt held by the Federal Reserve, which would clear $1.6 trillion under the debt ceiling. Or we could cut trillions of dollars in spending by bringing our troops home from overseas, making gradual reforms to Social Security and Medicare, and bringing the federal government back within the limits envisioned by the Constitution. Yet no one is willing to step up to the plate and make the hard decisions that are necessary. Everyone wants to kick the can down the road and believe...  More...

Fed Reserve Theme song: "Money for nothin, and your checks for free"

(click title to play, minimize media player to see lyrics below)

(FM Duck plays hot riffs in "Money for Nothing")

Sung to Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing”

I… want… my… ATM…

Now look at them bankers,
That’s the way you do it,
You print the money from the Fed Reserve.

That aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Money for nothin and your checks for free.

Now that aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb,
Maybe get a billion from a subprime mortgage,
Maybe get a billion from an SIV.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

See the little banker with the earring and the makeup,
Yeah buddy, that’s your 700 Billion,
That little chrome-dome, got his own jet airplane,
That little chrome-dome, he’s a billionaire.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

I shoulda learned to be a big banker,
I shoulda learned to loan that cash,
Look at that banker, he got it stickin out his pockets,
Man, we could rule the world.

And Paulson’s up there, what’s that?  Another Bailout?
Banging on the Congress like a chim-pan-zee,
No, that ain’t workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Get your money for nothing, get your checks for free.

We gotta inject a trillion free Dollars,
Custom credit derivatives,
We gotta move these refinanced bailouts,
We gotta move these toxic CDs.

Now that aint workin
that’s the way you do it,
You print the money from the Fed Reserve.

That aint workin,
That’s the way you do it,
Money for nothin and your checks for free,
Money for nothing… and…

And your checks for free.

Get your money for nothing…
And checks for free,
Look at that, look at that…
Money for nothing…
And your checks for free,
Ahh, money for nothing…
And your checks for free.

new lyrics ©2008-2011 FM Duck

--------------------

 Investing in Gold?

New!!  Feb 12, 2010: Ponzi Scheme - by Puru Saxena

Feb 26, 2009: Timmy, Larry and Benny are Lost in the Fiscal Wilderness - by Roger Wiegand

Dec 5, 2008: Red Alert: Gold Backwardation!!! - by Antal Fekete

Sep 24, 2008: The gold standard strikes back - by Antal Fekete

Sep 24, 2008: The killers are with the patient - by Darryl R. Schoon

Sep 09, 2008: Thinking like "Fat Tony" - by James Turk

May 16, 2008: Global Monetary Recap - 1944 to 2008 - by Douglas E. Johnston, Jr.

Apr 21, 2008: Hyperinflationary Depression - by Howard Ruff

Apr 01, 2008: Market Forecasting with Ongoing Mayhem - by Roger Wiegand

Mar 28, 2008: Forgotten Anniversary Haunts the Nation - by Antal Fekete

Mar 27, 2008: Gold is Going to the Moon - by Doug Casey

Mar 20, 2008: Cliff Notes on Financial Maelstrom - by Jim Willie

Jan 28, 2008: The Anti-Gold Gospel - by Antal Fekete

Nov 26, 2007: Our Diseased Monetary Bloodstream - by Antal Fekete

Nov 14, 2007: Subprime Mortgages lead to Subprime Currency - by John Lee

Oct 11, 2007: Hyperinflation Will Blow the Economic Doors Off - by Roger Wiegand

Aug 6, 2007: Inflation: Rotten to the Core - by Paul Mladjenovic

Feb 21, 2007: Congressman Ron Paul's Economic Report - by Alexander Korelin

Feb 6, 2007: Gold Price Manipulation - by Clive Maund

Jan 1, 2007: The Gold Standard Manifesto: Dismal Monetary Science - by Antal Fekete

The Future of Gold as Money - by Nelson Hultberg

Jul 26, 2006: Federal Reserve Follies: What Really Started the Great Depression - by Antal Fekete

Jun 1, 2006: Fiat and Credit - "The Coming Financial Holocaust"- by Nigel Maund

Dec 2005: New Fed Chairman "Crash & Bernanke" Confuses Depression Cure with Disease - by Peter Schiff

Citizens Against Government Waste

Who's the Federal Porker of the Month?
----------

Americans For a Free Republic

Editorials by Nelson Hultberg, Founder and Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republic

----------
The Boise Guardian
A different slant on the news...
----------

 Bush's Call Answered By Full Flex Gold As It Offers To Help Every Car Or Truck Owner Do Their Part To Stop Fossil Fuel Emissions.  More...  (View Video)

 Spotlight On:

Karl Marx Award
for
Worst Piece of U.S. Legislation
Aug 8, 2010

   The Dodd-Franks Financial Reform Bill, recently passed by both houses of Congress and soon to be signed by President Obama, is probably the worst Bill that has been passed since the original Federal Reserve Acts.  This new law, grants our central bank -- a private corporation of bankers -- the unconstitutional authority to control EVERY single business in America, which, in their opinion, needs to be "controlled" for the betterment of our economy.  In addition, the Federal Reserve obtains the autonomy to NEVER have to undergo a full audit, all of which is in direct violation of Article 1, Sections 8, 9, and 10 of the U.S. Constitution.  All this and tons more market interventionism was passed in the Dodd Bill by a majority of U.S. Congressmen and women who apparently have absolutely no clue whatsoever what real money is, what collateral means, why we need a 100%, non-fractional reserve gold standard, or anything else about the nature of money and banking.  Under the guise of correcting the cause of our current Recession -- which virtually nobody admits was actually CAUSED by the existence of the Federal Reserve and its illegally obtained monetary manipulation powers -- the Federal Reserve has now been granted complete control over every aspect of every citizen's life.  He who controls the money supply controls the nation and the Dodd Financial Reform Bill is the final nail that has just been driven into the coffin of free market capitalism.  The only hope left is if we can replace the current economic idiots in Congress in the upcoming 2010 elections with free market oriented Congressmen and women and repeal the Dodd Financial Reform Bill in its entirety.  And then we need to replace it with Rep Ron Paul's Audit the Fed, and then End the Fed Bills.  The solution to our national and global market problems is to get rid of all the interventionist central banking institutions throughout the world, not grant them more power to screw us over with their Ponzi Scheme monetary policies.  The score to date in the Obama Administration's quest to control all aspects of your money:  state collectivism 1, free market 0.  Wake up Americans.  This is not the change you voted for... or is it?

More on this piece of crap law...  Sat July 17...  The worst piece of legislation to become law within decades just passed both houses of Congress:  to wit, the Federal Reserve Empowerment Act.  This Act empowers a private group of central bankers the right to continue issuing pulp fiction dollars at hyper-inflationary rates, set interest rates at whatever they want, and regulate ALL businesses -- not just banks -- which, in their opinion threatens to "disrupt" whatever they define as "disrupt" in the market economy.  Think about that for a minute.  A group of bankers totally controlling every aspect of your life.  They can shut down your business, not approve your start up for a business, run you through bureaucratic mazes, and completely wreck, ruin, or provide special interest money for or against your business.  This new Act, touted by the Obama Administration as a new Consumer Protection Agency to protect us from what caused our current Recession, is just another central banking power grab for those international bankers who are using President Obama while he is using them.  The bankers want monetary and business control; Obama wants socialist redistributionist control.  The new Banking Reform Act gives both of them what they want.  The only problem is:  it will destroy the free market and thus destroy both Obama and the bankers in the long run.  While they are too stupid to understand their suicide mission, we are not and that is why we must dump both groups.  How?  First, we must dump the current crooks in the U.S. Congress in the 2010 elections and elect fiscal Conservatives and Libertarians.  Second, the new U.S. Congress must then repeal all the crap laws passed by Obama and his Progressive Communists.  Third, we must dump President Obama in the 2012 elections.  Fourth, we must then abolish both the Federal Reserve and then the IRS and get back to sound money, gold and silver money.  We can then allow private banks to issue gold and silver backed paper and credit and thus allow the free market to take off again.  Finally, we must never allow central bankers and socialists or any type of state collectivists to take over our Legislative or Executive branches of government again.  Never again.  What a complete waste of time and money -- and loss of lives in worthless overseas military adventures -- we have expended over the last 100 years, most of it choreographed, including WW II by FDR, by a bunch of stupid Progressives who understand zilch about the axiomatic primaries of inherent individual rights, private property rights, basic economics, and how one must allow the free market to work in order for prices to manifest themselves in the market or else all market action, calculation, and forecasts will fail.  It is not about good or bad intentions; it is all about the qualitative theory of price formation and how if you destroy that mechanism, you will have destroyed the very market mechanism that even socialists need in order to be successful.  Therefore, socialism and also central banking monetary manipulations, are at face value contradictory concepts.  They are oxymorons... and so are Obama and the central bankers leading everybody on their financial suicide mission.

       Local News      

In the Idaho Statesman Socialist Editorial Department, the editors applaud Gov Butch Otter for "maturing."  "Maturing" is now the Statesman editors' new euphemism for "We think the Gov has now converted to our view of collectivism," more accurately described by economic "fascism" in which the state manages a pretended free market.  What's the big issue?  Gov Otter -- a pretended Libertarian, supposedly schooled by free market mentor Ralph Smeed -- is making an argument to establish a state run health insurance exchange for Idaho.  Why?  Because Otter wants to receive $20 million from the federal government's ObamaCare, a nationalized health care abomination now under review -- or soon to be -- by the US Supreme Court.  Listen to how the Idaho Statesman describes Medicaid:  "Medicaid is a terrific investment for Idaho.  For every 30-cents the state puts in, the feds pony up a 70-cent match."  Except for one thing.  From where do the economic-idiots at the Idaho Statesman think the federal government obtains $20 million to distribute as "free money" to Idaho?  And from where do the economic-idiots at the Idaho Statesman think the feds obtain the trillions and trillions of dollars that it will take to fund ObamaCare when it really starts rolling?  Do the editors even correlate our current $15 trillion dollar national debt, hyperinflation of our money supply, high unemployment, housing bubble, and current global recession with the pulp fiction dollars -- not backed by anything -- that the feds are passing out to everybody in the nation?  And in Federal Reserve "swaps" to the European Union to try and bail out The Euro?  Money does not grow on trees.  It is not being collected by taxes.  It is simply being printed up or digitized in federal computers.  Health care is not some commodity whose billions of market parameters are somehow exempt from the basic laws of economics.  Printing up pulp fiction dollars and distributing them out to all the states for wonderfully intended "humane" purposes is turning out to be exactly the opposite:  the nation is collapsing under a huge burden of debt and people are becoming less able to afford or obtain the shrinking commodity we call medical care.  Or even a job.  All brought about by the same type of thinking espoused by the editors at the Idaho Statesman.  They do not understand the nature of money or capital.  It doesn't matter whether you call it socialism, fascism, or any other form of state collectivism.  And when another politician -- in this case, Idaho Gov Butch Otter -- falls for the Ponzi Scheme of "free money" from the feds, it is just plain stupid to claim that "he has matured."  Otter has not "matured."  He has become blinded by the false light at the end of the socialist tunnel.  A better description is to say that Otter has "devolved" into the contradiction of altruistic collectivism, which inherently must fail since it destroys the very pricing mechanism necessary for any free market to succeed.  This is not maturity; this is childishness.

Sun Jun 26, 2011

Boise, ID -- Is Boise, Idaho selling itself to Communist China?  Yes and no.  The left Liberal Idaho Statesblab reports a contradiction when it says that China has not bought 55 square miles of land south of Boise in order to build a Chinese free trade zone but the Idaho Dept of Commerce, Gov Butch Otter and associates, Boise City Mayor Dave Bieter, the Boise Airport Commission, and maybe even Ada County (??) have discussed granting special trading privileges to The People's Democratic Republic of China.  So let's be clear.  There is a difference between establishing a totally free trade zone for all businesses, foreign and domestic, which is OK with FM Duck, vs. the establishment of special tariffs (even down to zero) for special goodie-goodie gum drops government trading partners in a government to government trading set up.  It sounds like what the various levels of government in Idaho are attempting to do is the latter:  special fortune cookies for special Commie friends in the hopes of boosting the Idaho economy vs. a true free market capitalism Free Trade Zone for everybody.  We think it is not the proper business of government at any level to trek all over the globe setting up govt to govt trade deals.  The only proper function of govt is to guarantee and protect every individual's freedom to trade and private property rights.  Let's stop the bullshit about how the government can stimulate the economy by inflating the paper dollar.  Let's get back to the real free market and free choice of currency.  The consumer should pick winners and losers with their pocket books, not governments in partnerships with Communist nations whose internal individual rights violations border on worse than the obscene.  Advice to the Idaho Dept of Commerce and all levels of Idaho government:  Chill, dudes.  It's not your business to sell Idaho to China, through government-to-government fake free trade zones or otherwise.

Fri Jun 17, 2011

Meridian, ID -- Anybody want to learn how not to manage a project, just follow the example by Meridian City Council.  Meridian is a bedroom community of about 70,000 residents butting up against Boise, Idaho.  Fifteen years ago, it was Hodunk Jr. with about 15,000 people.  Responding to the housing boom created by the Fed Reserve via Fannie, Freddie, and the US drunken sailors in Congress from 2004 - 2006, the Meridian City Council decided they needed to build a fancy dancey, $12 million whoop-tee-doo City Hall building, complete with waterfalls, lots of offices, and an amphitheatre.  So they hired Petra Builders and contracted out various tasks to subs directly, not via Petra.  Petra claims there is an Idaho law that says Petra can't use or control subs.  Buzz.  Wrong.  Not true.  Otherwise nobody could ever build anything in Idaho.  The City Hall was built, the cost skyrocketed from $12 million to $21 million, and the politicians moved in in 2008.  The crap should have hit the fan long before the price tag doubled but the politicos wanted all the extra goodies.  Project management design reviews were either non-existent or may as well have been since the city didn't stop any of the over-budgeted spending.  Now, after the fact, Meridian City says, hey the air conditioner doesn't work, the ceiling leaks, and the waterfall ain't falling right, etc.  So Meridian City Council, in its infinite political wisdom, sued Petra for what they claimed were outrageous over-bloated sums.  The brilliant Council did not even consider the risk/rewards of possibly losing a multi-gazillion dollar lawsuit and having to pay both sets of attorneys' fees.  So, Meridian City initiated a lawsuit, lost their ass vs. Petra and now owe, get this: two times $1.8 million for both sets of attorneys' fees and a half million buckaroos in awards by Here Come Da Judge.  Petra offered to negotiate with the City of Idiots before the court date but the politicians turned them down.  Petra had suggested before going to court that everybody should pay their own lawyer fees but the City of Dummies turned them down.  Oh, we want to sue, and win the big bucks, thought the Meridian City Dunce Caps.  Uh-huh.  Guessing wrong, they sued and lost $4 million.  Petra says if Meridian had not insisted on the waterfalls, the amphitheatre, dancing girls and extra lollipops, they could have saved over 75% of the added costs.  Masonry work estimated at $1.2 million by the City of Dumbbell experts was determined by the judge to be worth only $6,000.  Wow, they were only off by, well, how about the entire amount practically.  $6,000 compared to $1.2 million?  Who's pulling whose ding-a-ling here?  The upshot?  The City of Blunderers wants to appeal this ruling -- $3.6 million of which went to the lawyers -- to the Idaho Supreme Court.  Cough-cough, appeal it to the Idaho Supreme Court, my ass!  Somebody get me a Tylenol and a glass of Johnny Walker 200 Proof while I start up a Petition to Recall the entire Meridian City Council and ride them out of town on a wooden rail.

Thur May 26, 2011

Boise, ID -- Eleven Idaho school districts in 1999 and 2008 show spending per student increased between 10 and 122 percentage points regardless of whether the districts lost or gained students. All numbers are from the Idaho State Department of Education website.

The Twin Falls School District came in first with an increase in student population of 433 students between 1999 and 2008 and increased spending of nearly $49 million. Boise’s per-student spending went up by 58% after losing nearly 2000 students. The Bonneville School District in Idaho Falls spent 45% more per student in 2008 than it did in 1999 while the Idaho Falls School District, in the same city, raised spending by 22%. It’s almost a relief to see Pocatello’s increase in per-student spending was a mere 10%; after losing 589 students, spending went up only four million dollars.

Per student spending in Meridian went up by 32% over the first decade of the new millennium, you know, from the increased property taxes during the government-created housing inflation via Fannie and Freddie, fueled by the Federal Reserve.  Now that the housing bubble has popped and everybody is unemployed, why do the public servants down at local public school 101 think they should still be collecting the same amount of money from turnips whose blood has already been totally extracted?  Scream all you want, public union teachers, there is no money left.  And the teachers are crying because their share of paying for their own health insurance might skyrocket -- yes, skyrocket to the moon -- from a whole $11 per month to $35 per month while anybody else left working in the private sector is paying for the entire amount themselves, $300 to $600 a month.  Oh boo-hoo, let's all sob for the poor government public employees union.  Actually, they should start crying for themselves because if New York and California public employees retirement pension funds are any indication, i.e. they're bankrupt, the Idaho PERSI funds won't be there either.  You guys better start demanding personal control of your retirement benefits via 401k accounts or something or you will be working your little asses off for zip, zero, nothing, nada in retirement bennies at the end of your life sentences.  I mean, like, you know,  I'm just saying... wake up, teachers!  Your PERSI accounts are freaking heading toward bankruptcy!

Fri May 20, 2011

Boise, ID -- When will the editors at the Idaho Statesman news rag figure out that the concept of public education is over?  The people of Idaho's largest school district, Meridian, just voted NO WAY JOSE on a new property tax increase.  Not just because the new generation of parents are out of a job, not just because the new generation of unemployed parents now have the time -- since they're not working -- to more closely review the way in which government spending -- from the federal level to the state, county, city, and school board level -- has played a huge part in our country's national bankruptcy, and not just because they are tired of the NO RESULTS of the public employee unions running our nationalized school systems.  No, they are part of a new generation of youthful parents who aren't buying into the socialist idea that (1) public education is a right, (they know it's just another economic commodity), or that (2) states should be going bankrupt to pay for the NEA-AFL-CIO employee unions whose forced dues go to political parties, mostly Democratic, whose national policies the young parents disagree with.  Our government-created Depression, unemployment and hyperinflation has created a whole new class of young individuals who, via the Internet, are able to find out that the public education system is a giant failure, both fiscally and academically.  And that is why the parents in all the major school districts in Idaho voted HELL NO in last Tuesday's multi-godzillion dollar property tax increase, euphemistically called Increased School Tax Bonds.  It's actually nothing but throwing more taxpayer money down a bottomless fake education rat hole.  Idaho already throws away over $1.6 billion -- 65% or more -- of its annual budget on public education and the results are pathetic.  Not because most teachers aren't dedicated.  They are.  But public education jobs are so bureaucratically governed and financially full of waste, fraud, and abuse that it's like asking why Amtrak or the USPS (who just lost another $8.6 billion this year) can't make a profit or operate within a reasonable budget.  If your enterprise isn't making a profit, then the clients are being screwed.  Government bureaus can't make profits; it's not applicable.  They only know how to spend more and more.  There is nothing in government accounting to tell the schools that they are losing.  That's one reason why we need free market schools, so we know where and how we're losing our shirts.  So far, we've lost our shirts, pants, socks, panties, bras, and jock straps.  Profit and loss statements should apply in all huge endeavors, including education, which should be free market, or something is really going badly.  To claim that education should be a Blue Light Loss Leader because it is special and children are special and their education is special and on and on blathering through the entire labyrinth of left Liberal state collectivist specialism is just plain bullshit.  The only function of govt is to protect individual private property rights, including your own mind and body.  Its function is not to redistribute everybody's wealth for supposed public education or public health care or public transportation or public XBOX games and lollipops.  If you want results, and if you want to simultaneously retain individual private property rights, we must abolish public education and allow private free market schools to flourish just like any other commodity or service in a true free market.

May 14, 2011

Boise, ID -- The editors at the Idaho Statesman's parent company, McClatchy Newspapers, stupidly claimed last week, "It May Sound Like Heresy, But We're Under-Taxed."  Really?  And then they go on to lie with statistics as if we were all born yesterday.  Problem is, the editors at McClatchy have no idea about what constitutes a tax.  When the government is busy hyper-inflating our paper and digitized money supply, then that is a tax on the people since it is a clever form of monetary debasement that taxes one's productivity and value.  It's called taxflation.  And during taxflation, the real value of current and historical taxes are skewed because the nominal values are devaluing.  It's like saying you're becoming richer in an inflationary economy because your gross has increased when actually you are losing because all prices increase too. The entire article is just another example of how the left Liberal Progressives at the Statesman Newsrag want to snow you into thinking that your taxes are too low during our current hyper-inflation and Depression, and preparing you for their next article that says you should be happy for another government tax increase.  Meanwhile, we will surpass our national debt ceiling on Monday, May 16, as the US Treasury sells another $72 billion in worthless T-Bills and Bonds to themselves via their prime gangsta banksta members who will then sell it right back to the Federal Reserve who created it in the first place.  What a ginormous Ponzi Scheme against the unsuspecting American public.  And the Idaho Statesman Newspaper thinks we are, like, you know, grossly under-taxed?  Is that why grocery prices are skyrocketing and the real unemployment rate is 15% to 20%?  Yeah, and I got a Brooklyn Bridge I can sell to you next week for really cheap, too.  Uh-huh...

Idaho Gov Butch Otter's 2011 Budget doesn't balance

Jan 11, 2011

Boise, ID -- First, girl friends, let's get one thing straight:  Idaho Gov Butch Otter is NOT a Libertarian.  But, as Ralph Smeed -- Otter's attempted-to-be mentor -- remarked to me at lunch one day, "unfortunately, he's the best we got."  At least right now.  So, major Idaho news media, while Gov Butch Otter is on the right track for many of our social-political-economic concerns, rest assured that he is still a Libertarian on Monday, a Democrat on Tuesday, a Republican on Wednesday, a Tea Partier on Thursday, a Progressive on Friday, a Cowboy on Saturday, and a good Catholic on Sunday.  That means Gov Otter will do whatever he perceives as politically expedient for the moment.  Take Idaho's budget, for example.  In his State of the State Speech yesterday, he was all over the economic and free market map.  Facing a $344 million budget shortfall, Otter conjured up about six major areas to address this shortfall.  Unfortunately, none of it addressed in any meaningful manner, the state's single largest budget expenditure (next to the No. 1 budget expense, Medicaid):  Public Education.  That's why Otter is not a Libertarian.  On Pub Ed, Otter is a left Liberal Progressive.  Yes, he babbled about how he and School Superintendent Tom Luna want to rearrange the educational deck chairs on the Pub Ed Titanic -- but without cutting any of the current waste, fraud, and abuse in today's Pub Ed expenses.  Expenses totaling some 60-odd percent of Idaho's entire annual budget of about $2.6 Billion dollars.  In other words, Gov Otter did not address how he should have looked at Sacred Cow Pub Ed, one of the state's largest budget outlays, riddled with tons of waste, fraud, and abuse, to solve his $344 million 2011 budget shortfall.  If he worked for me at a large corporation, I would have fired his ass for this budgetary incompetence.  Yes, it's nice to tell everybody what they should already know:  Pub Ed would be more efficient if we used the Internet and Virtual Academies to implement it, so why not broach the subject of individual rights to NOT have to pay for the waste, fraud, and abuse of our NEA and IEA union-dominated and bankrupt Public Education System, and simultaneously incorporate that into the moral philosophy of free market capitalism?  Because Otter is too afraid to be a true Libertarian.  Same as most of our politicians at the local, state, and federal levels, assuming they even know what individual rights and free market capitalism are.  Empirically, Gov Otter suggested savings of $35.5 million from Health & Welfare, $20 million from a stash sitting around in some accounts, $74 million from an unused tobacco Millennium Fund, and $15 million by undoing a grocery tax credit fund.  Hmm, subtracting the sum of these four items from the $344 million deficit, we still have a $200 million deficit.  What to do, what to do.  Well, said Gov Otter, how about splitting the needed revenue between receiving Extra Revenue (a nice term for more freaking taxes) and No Public Employee Pay Increases?  So, more taxes and somebody praying for more tax revenue to make up for the $200 million shortfall?  Right, Uh-huh.  You're fired, dude.  Look again at the Pub Ed budget.  It's ridiculous.  I downloaded the entire Idaho Pub Ed budget for 2004, some years ago, put the major items in an Excel Spreadsheet, and discovered so much waste, fraud, abuse, and redundancy that I could probably have cut the whole Pub Ed budget in half and provided twice over a good education to all the kiddies in Idaho, K through Post Doc.  Like I said above, Gov Otter is doing the correct thing in trying to dump ObamaCare and not incurring more state programs.  But, let's face it:  he's still a Libertarian on Monday, a Democrat on Tuesday, a Republican on Wednesday, a Tea Partier on Thursday, a Progressive on Friday, a Cowboy on Saturday, and a good Catholic on Sunday.  And Gov Otter will still play politics and do whatever he perceives as politically expedient for the moment.  Mainly, no no no no, don't touch the Sacred Cow of the largest (next to largest) immoral and ridiculous budget expenditure in the state:  Government Education, which is a total financial and educational failure, and exists only to serve the purposes of the AFL-CIO-NEA union structure, whose main function -- as deceased Libertarian Ralph Smeed noted -- is to turn our children into good little state collectivists who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag of Marxist economic sophisms.

Idaho Statesman editors kinda, sorta, get it RE understanding federal deficits...maybe

Dec 24, 2010

Boise, ID -- Whoa, girl friends, everybody jump off their side saddle and pour themselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  We have to offer a toast to the left Liberal Progressives over at The Idaho Statesman newspaper for finally understanding what's wrong with incurring more and more federal deficits.  Let's give credit where credit is due. Kudos to you guys.  But let's also not overdo it since I suspect the editors at our Lefty Daily Boise Blab really don't understand Basic Econ 101A vis a vis individual private property rights, Austrian free market economics, and the ins and outs of all the counterfeiting going on by our central bankers, the Federal Reserve.  Having said that and throwing the editors a provisional doggie Bon-Bon, the Statesman editors in their OUR VIEW editorial on Dec 19th of last week, The tax-cut plan: White House and Congress have traded short term political gain for long term pain, chastised three out of Idaho's four U.S. Congressmen for voting YES for the Obama Bush Tax-Cut -- make that a Tax Increase since it amounts to a whopping $858 Billion deficit increase, plus interest.  Both Idaho U.S. Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch -- who we have consistently warned everybody were RINOs in GOP clothing -- were slapped up one side and down the other by the Idaho Statesman editors for lying through their teeth and posing as fiscal Conservatives.  Said the Statesman about Senator Jim Risch, "If the Bush tax cuts are to remain on the books — and Risch, R-Idaho, wants them in place permanently — it’s past time to find corresponding spending cuts. Until those savings are identified and fully vetted, it’s impossible to have a rational discussion about the pros and cons of keeping the tax rates permanent."  Well hallelujah for you, Statesman editors.  It's apparently gotten so bad or so obvious that even the lefties at the Statesman are wising up about the fraud and future pain of deficit spending.  Maybe the word "trillion" is beginning to sink into their little noggins and is beginning to scare the crap out of them because they took remedial math and know that "quadrillion" follows "trillion."  Speaking of crap, the Statesman editors jumped on Senator Crapo, too.  Crapo is one of the original authors of the $858 Billion Obama Bush Tax-Increase Plan, working on Obama's supposed Deficit Reduction Committee.  Crapo voted for $4 Trillion in deficit relief while simultaneously claiming that this provides a "stimulus" -- you know how counterfeiters printing off $100 Franklins in their basement on HP color printers "stimulate" the economy -- that would offset Obama's Soc Sec payroll tax cuts and other sundry Keynesian quantitative economics baloney known in street talk as "robbery through inflation."  Crapo is obviously totally confused about basic economics and money, plus what constitutes spending, taxation, and deficits.  I wonder if he knows the difference between up and down, left or right, or in and out?  The man, like most of his colleagues on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, have no clue.  Saving the best of the Statesman's raking-over-the-coals of our U.S. Congressdopes for last, the editors said about soon-to-be-replaced Democratic Rep Walt Minnick, "Walt Minnick’s yes vote is baffling — after the two years he spent presenting himself as a Blue Dog Democrat and dedicated deficit hawk. In a guest opinion in the Statesman 10 days ago, Minnick penned the following words: 'Every businessman, and anyone who has ever managed a checkbook, knows you can’t survive borrowing 40 cents of every dollar you spend.' In his last vote of note, Minnick approved more borrowing, leaving the payback to the folks who will follow him."  In closing, FM Duck finally agrees with the Idaho Statesman's once in a lifetime awakening as they state, "In order to celebrate this compromise [the Obama Bush $858 Billion Deficit Lack of a Plan], we would have to suspend our fears about the deficit, that seemingly bottomless pit that awaits not too far down the road. We would have to conveniently forget the grave warnings, uttered across the political spectrum, about the state of the budget.  Sorry. We can’t do it.  So we are disappointed that three-fourths of the state’s congressional delegation endorsed this dubious deal."  Yeah, no kidding, Idaho Statesman.  So are we.  But we at The Duckster are wondering if you really finally get it about altruistic state collectivism, or are you going to come back tomorrow and completely contradict yourselves by advocating more tax and spend policies, you know, like for your favorite special interest programs, such as public statist education, socialist medical care, food stamps, drug and alcohol rehab centers, more billions for central banks to support the Petro Dollar Wars in the Middle East, and free chocolate chip cookies for Afro-Indo-Eurasian-Native American blue-eyed blondes every other Tuesday at 8:00 pm Equal People Time?  One pro-free market editorial doth not a Libertarian maketh, but, hey, thanks for what we hope will be foreshadowing for your future editorials.

Idaho Statesman editors clueless about free markets and education

Dec 16, 2010

Boise, ID -- The left Liberal editors at the Idaho Statesman, once again, don't understand how the free market works and thus are busy wringing their little hannies over how best to manipulate and manage the state of Idaho's economy -- as if governmental intervention itself that the Statesman proposes isn't the cause of the Recession and unemployment in the first place.  The editors erroneously ask, "Facing a projected $340 million shortfall for 2011-12, do lawmakers compound the state’s unprecedented cuts to K-12 and higher education?"  And then make the fallacious statement, "If politicos cut budgets by 14 percent across the board, they will continue a destructive dismantling of the school system that is the linchpin to job creation."  Oops, whoa there little filly.  Buzz, wrong!  The public school system is not only NOT the linchpin to job creation, the public education system is the major ideological and empirical source of our current Recession, unemployment, lack of a sound monetary system, and the current altruistic state collectivism running rampant today, a bankrupt Marxist ideology that is being taught to all of our children from K-12 through post Doc Economics and in many other subjects.  This altruistic collectivist ideology -- taught in all subjects from Math to English to Economics, "OK, Johnny, share your answer with little Suzie and then tell the class your collective conclusion" -- is literally destroying the individualist thinking of our students and, therefore, the necessary thought processes that bring about and maintain the ideology of what should be a free market capitalist system.  The true linchpin of job creation is individual rights philosophy, which leads to sound money creation and usage, which leads to free market capitalism, which finally leads to businessmen and women taking profit and loss risks in a free unfettered market in which they can reasonably calculate, forecast, and take action according to their qualitative decisions about supply and demand and price creation.  But the current public education system has destroyed all of these free market concepts.  So our children are growing up as little Marxist socialists -- or some variation on the theme of altruistic state collectivism -- and thus, as economically uninformed citizens.  Our college graduates are voluntarily, although unwittingly, destroying the very principles and necessary conditions for the creation of jobs, of sound money, and limited government.  Public Education has literally created students who advocate economic financial suicide without knowing it.  The left Liberals at the Idaho Statesman are actually advocating taking more Arsenic as the solution to our economy's Arsenic Poisoning Problem, our Recession and high unemployment brought about by the socialist ideas embedded at all levels of Public Education.  The real solution -- and Mother Nature will soon bring it about if we don't do it ourselves -- is a return to free market education, private educational institutions, and dumping the waste, fraud, and abuse, inherent in all socialist educational systems, which is exactly what the U.S. Pub Ed system really is: socialist education.  Good teachers moving from public to private education would not lose their jobs; they would just change employers from government to private and parents would finally regain control and responsibility of their own children's education without dragging their neighbors into a non-voluntary, income redistributive, high tax system (Pub Ed).  Public Education is not the "lynchpin" solution to our high unemployment and Recession.  Free market education and free market capitalism is the solution.

Idaho on the Verge of Bankruptcy in 2012

Nov 21, 2010

Boise, ID – Idaho is on the verge of bankruptcy in 2012.  That's right, B-A-N-K-R-U-P-T-C-Y.

   And the major cause is the huge, never-ending, expanding expenditures for Public Education and Health and Welfare year after year after year.

   The percentage of Idaho's $2.5 billion annual budget comprising K-12 and university expenditures varies around 65% to 75% year in and year out.  The standard left Liberal excuse for this obscene taxation and full employment for the AFL-CIO-NEA unions is that (1) only the government knows how to concoct teaching programs and (2) parents, if left free to choose, would never provide free market education for their children.

   Both of these left Liberal assertions are untrue but are so inculcated in the minds of the citizenry that the American people would rather go bankrupt than question the wisdom of the Pub Ed Folly.

   First, education is too important to be left to unions and government bureaucracy.

   Second, the majority of parents would, given the choice, gladly take responsibility for educating their own children.   Soon, as the Recession continues to cut tax revenues, they may not have a choice.

   Third, the free market and private enterprise with new technology such as Internet schools make it much more cheaper to education one's own children via Virtual Academies than ever before.

   Fourth, it is immoral to confiscate at the point of a gun, taxpayer money to redistribute to a huge government brick and mortar public education industry and force children to attend what amounts to a Public Brainwashing System for the left Liberal Progressives whose major goal, by the way, is not education but rather to create a citizenry of little authoritarians to learn revisionist history and fall in line with state collectivist programs.

   In Idaho, the current Pub Ed budget for 2010 - 2011 depends upon $270 million in non-recurring revenue.  School Superintendent Tom Luna is asking for an additional $61 million for K-12 budget for next year.  Idaho's universities want an extra $28.3 million for 2011.  Idaho's Health and Welfare wants an extra $70 million for 2011.  The total shortfall for budget year 2012 will top $270 million plus $70 million for H & W plus the $89 for K-12 through university.  Do the math:  That's about $430 million more in taxpayer money that the state legislature would have to cough up just to stay current with today's Pub Ed and H & W funding "needs."

   And, as usual, the left Liberals down at the Idaho Statesman news rag are sobbing and whining that if this money is not obtained -- somehow, from somewhere, what... print it up out of nowhere? -- then...  More...

Idaho Voters Asked to Vote Away Their Rights to Vote…Huh?

Oct 04, 2010

Boise, ID – Ya-yess, girl friends, you read that right.  Pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  The Idaho state legislature passed three constitutional amendments to be voted upon at the Nov 2, 2010 elections.

   All three constitutional amendments are requesting that the people of Idaho go to the polls and – believe it or not -- vote to repeal their right to vote on future public indebtedness.  That’s right, girl friends.  You are cleverly being asked to shoot yourself in your own pocketbook and fork over as much money as public airports, public hospitals, and public power facilities feel like spending for whatever the current Flavor of the Day happens to strike their fancy, including:  More...

Former Gov Kempthorne moves up...
Does crime pay?

(Sep 25, 2010)

Boise, ID – In a drooling Progressive article in today's left Liberal newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, reporter Dan Popkey reveals how crime really does pay for crooked politicians.

   The perp in Popkey's article is none other than ex Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne, who -- as we all remember from reading Deep Throat II's book:  Boise's Watergate, University Place & All The Governor's Men -- was one of the major participants in the quarter of a billion dollar financial fiasco comprising the unconstitutional building of the new Ada County Courthouse Complex and the failed $136 million University Place fiasco.

   Only one person in that huge fiscal mess that lasted from 1998 through 2008 was convicted of a crime.  And that was U of Idaho financial administrator Jerry Wallace while everybody else, including the crooked California developers called "Cryptic Partners" by author Deep Throat II, got off Scott free because Idaho law says only the person in charge of the money, the treasurer, can be held culpable for these type of crimes.  The planners, the getaway car driver, the shooters, and other perps cannot be held guilty for any of the crimes against the taxpayers of Idaho.  Ergo, Kempthorne got off, Kempthorne's Chief of Staff, lawyer Roy Eiguren, got off with only a hand slap and small fine, as well as did all the other perps involved in this crime spree against the Idaho taxpayers.

   Kempthorne escaped Idaho to be promoted to President G.W. Bush's Secretary of the Interior where he also did nothing but appoint tons of committees and commissions and boards, as was his M.O. in Idaho from Mayor of Boise to U.S. Senator, to oversee and usher in the results of such fiascos that we now see in Obama's administration:  the BP oil spill by a company that incurred over 700 EPA and other citations for Gulf of Mexico oil drilling violations, all this while Kempthorne's Dept of the Interior allegedly engaged in sexual harassment (or other fun time) nasty office parties in Colorado.

   Notice how fast that was covered up during the Bush Administration with Kempthorne promising to "look into it."

   Popkey, of course, had his own sticky little fingers involved in the Boise Watergate Bruhaha -- namely, busy dating one of the women partners in one of the perp law firms, Givens-Pursley, that he was supposedly investigating as a "journalist" for the Idaho Statesman.  An obvious conflict of interest.  But besides that, Popkey fully supported the entire concept and methodologies of the cheating Ada County Commissioners with Idaho Supreme Court judge(s) and a consortium of other legal beagles in Idaho in their complicity with California's "Cryptic Partners" to bilk the Ada County taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in rigged political and financial deals.

   As one of the key perps in this entire sordid mess, Kempthorne should never have been confirmed as Sec of the Interior and please note, dear reader, that copies of all the investigations contained in, and related to, the 603-page Prince Report (by Special Deputy Attorney General Larry Prince) was sent to all the leading Senators on the U.S. Senate panel who confirmed Kempthorne as Sec of the Interior and NOBODY -- and I mean NOBODY -- at that hearing or panel or anywhere else ever asked any questions about Kempthorne's Boise Watergate participation or connections.  So much for the GOP in Idaho and the GOP in our U.S. Parliament of Whores.

   So, as Popkey pointed out, crime does pay, as Kempthorne's salary -- for being chosen as president and CEO (that's a real joke since all Kempthorne knows how to do is to appoint "Blue Ribbon Commissions" to look into 'it," with "it" being whatever the crooked flavor of the day happens to be) of the Washington DC-based Life Insurers Council -- is slated to be comparable to current CEO, ex Gov of Oklahoma Frank Keating's, $1.5 million plus another $1.5 million in whatever other chocolate chip cookies he can get for being head lobbyist directing the pay offs to both Democrats and Republicans in Congress for special interest legislation.

   Quoting Popkey's article, "Wow," said Kempthorne's former partner in Idaho crime, Roy Eiguren, "It's a very significant accolade to have a job like this."  Oh, you bet, Roy.  Both Eiguren and Kempthorne were Student Body Presidents of the U of Idaho in the 1970s, the same University they helped financially decimate in the 1990s and 2000s to the tune of $136 million in the failed University Place fiasco.

   Added another Idaho political crook, former GOP Sen. Steve Symms, Kempthorne's Senate predecessor, "Dirk will become wealthy doing this.  It's a great job and it will secure his family."

   Well, yahoo and whoop-tee-doo, Senator Symms.  That's what's really important here, isn't it:  namely, the continual bribing of the U.S. Congress for special interest legislation for the Life Insurance Companies of America.  Uh-huh.

   Progressive reporter Dan Popkey is absolutely correct:  "A public career [did] pay off for Idaho's Dirk Kempthorne."  So, let's all sing together now, "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me."  (Wanna read the hilariously funny, but true, book by Deep Throat II, Boise's Watergate: University Place & All The Governor's Men, click HERE to buy a copy at reduced cost; hey, get a copy for all your Boise friends for Christmas.)

Socialist Double Speak:  Why Aren’t Boise’s Sales Tax Exemptions Considered a Stimulus to the Economy?

(Sep 25, 2010)

Boise, ID – As usual, the left Liberal Progressives at the Idaho Statesman newspaper like to play a game of Socialist Double Speak, depending on what they want.  When the left Liberals claim that Keynesian economics can “stimulate” an economy by printing up tons of paper money and distributing said dollars out to everybody to spend, the left Liberals call it a “stimulus.”  But when the left Liberals claim they need to tax the crap out of everybody to spend on government education, the socialist left Liberals redefine leaving money in the pockets of the taxpayers as dirty “sales tax exemptions.”

   So which is it:  a nasty sales tax exemption or a “stimulus” to the economy, or both?

   What’s the difference between the government inflating more paper money and giving it away to taxpayers to spend, and the government allowing sales tax exemptions to be left in the pockets of people so they can spend it?

   The difference is that the left Liberals do not have a rational view of economics and thus tend to redefine the same actions – leaving or putting money in the pockets of consumers -- in contradictory terms as their (the left Liberals’) purposes suit them.  A lot of it has nothing to do with economics but rather with the exercise of raw power.  That’s another story for another day.

   If Liberals want more money from the consumers for Public Education, they vilify sales tax exemptions as wrongful money left in the pockets of the consumer.  If Liberals want the consumers to spend spend spend to “stimulate” the economy, they redefine putting more money into the taxpayers’ pockets as a wonderful “stimulus.”  Thus, leaving money in the pockets of consumers due to not taxing them is, for Liberals, not the same as printing up and putting money into the pockets of consumers.  In the first instance, they define it as a bad, nasty sales tax exemption, and in the latter case they call it a wonderful economic “stimulus.”  What a contradiction.

   The real irony of this twisted economic reasoning is that Liberals want to implement both programs simultaneously AND they do not view this as a contradiction in terms.  In their illogical minds, money in peoples’ pockets is not the same as money in peoples’ pockets.  Sales tax exemptions are not seen by Liberals as a stimulus to the economy.

   So let’s briefly look at what the left Liberals stupidly argue as “tax exemptions” with the left hand while denying this same money as a “stimulus” with the right hand.  Let’s look at Popkey’s definition of “foregone revenue” -- sales tax exemptions -- from the Top 10 Sales Tax Breaks while...  More...

Boise’s Ada County Detox Center Bankrupt Within One Year as Cities Refuse to Cough Up the Dough to Pay for it

(Aug 29th, 2010)

Boise, ID – As predicted, Boise’s Ada County Detox Center for drunks and druggies ain't working out so well as a government solution.

   It's actually rather humorous to read the Idaho Statesman's progressive (pun intended) historical articles from before The Drunk Tank was built, claiming the Treasure Valley Will Curl Up and Die Without a Detox Center, to after it was built, Yippee, The Detox Center Has Opened, Champagne for Everybody Except the Inmates, to today’s Oh-oh, Boise, Meridian, and Garden City Ain't Coughing up Enough Dough to Finance the New Detox Center.

   As we have reported over and over in these pages, Boise's Treasure Valley does not need a publicly-financed Detox Center.  Let the free market handle the drunks and druggies who CHOOSE to alter their brains with recreational booze and drugs and end up at emergency hospital clinics or jail.  That's exactly what those facilities are for: extraordinary emergencies.

   Let's stop pretending that hospital emergency rooms are not for drug overdoses.  The fact that county hospitals must take in indigent drunks and druggies is steeped in ridiculous law.  Change the law.  In a free market, the hospital could choose to accept these patients or not.  And that is what we should be striving for:  a free market in medicine, not more subsidized government intervention into the health care of Americans.  That's exactly what is wrong with ObamaCare, which hopefully will be repealed in 2011 with a new Congress.

   It is not the responsibility of Ada County citizens to pay for the alcohol and drug induced overdoses of the perps who can't handle their liquor and pills.  To the extent that the perps go on a crime spree, yes, it is the responsibility of the cops and courts to arrest and try the bad guys, and that's what we have law enforcement for:  criminal acts of infringement, not the fact that they ingested or over-ingested recreational substances.

   Using the standard left Liberal excuse of, "Well, gosh, gee whizzers, the drunks and druggies will end up in either jail or emergency hospital rooms we all have to pay for anyway," is a simple-ass excuse that is totally irrelevant since the law shouldn’t care why you committed the crime or what you ate for lunch before you robbed the bank.  For the same reasons we don't build Detox Robbery Centers for bank robbers and Detox Murder Centers for killers, we shouldn’t be building Detox Alcohol or Drug Centers for drunks and druggies on the premise that it would lower the cost of bank robbers and murderers having to go through being arrested, booked, and held down at the county jail.  How absurd.

   So, now we have the real costs coming in for the Treasure Valley's Necessary, Yeah, folks, Necessary Ha-Ha Detox Center:  a 16-bed joke in Ada County called The Allumbaugh House.  Notice how the state collectivists always call their monuments to state intervention a "House" instead of the "Drunk Tank” or “The Drug Hotel?"  That makes it sound more like a politically correct "goodie-goodie" place of It's Not My Fault, It's Society's Responsibility, Rehabilitation Center.  Uh-huh.  Right.  Progressives always like to remove individual rights and responsibility from human relationships and shift it to collectivist government control.

   But let’s listen in as the left Liberal Idaho Statesman now reports -- more like whining -- why the Detox Hotel, I mean Allumbaugh House, ain't working out so well:

"Now, Allumbaugh House symbolizes something else: another ugly and misdirected free-for-all between local governments."

   Really?  Wow, what a shock, girl friends.  We never saw this coming, right?  The Statesman continues:

"The basic dispute has nothing to do with detox, and centers on the costs of running magistrate courts. Armed with a pair of favorable court rulings, one dating to 1980, Ada County is seeking a total of more than $4.5 million from Boise, Meridian and Garden City."

   Wow, again.  Like the politicians didn't know the true costs of Allumbaugh House before they built it and FROM WHERE the funding would come?  More from the Progressive Idaho Statesman:

"The county has the law on its side, and the cities have an obligation to help pay. The cities can't be blamed for feeling sticker shock, though. Boise's annual bill would jump from $600,000 to $3.3 million. Meridian and Garden City each would pay $660,350, a steep increase from their current annual bill - zero."

   Whoa, so are you telling me that the City of Boise didn't know they were on the hook for an extra $2.75 million to $3 million in taxes for the Detox Hotel, I mean Allumbaugh House?  Tell us more, Statesman, tell us more, this is getting hilariously ridiculous:

"The county is playing hardball. The cities face an Oct. 1 eviction date. In the meantime, the cost-cutting commissioners are looking to jettison what they now call "non-essential services," such as their $250,000 share of Allumbaugh House's $1.8 million budget."

   Wait a NY minute here.  If Allumbaugh House's budget is $1.8 million,...  More...

The One Thing

By Ralph Perez
(March 25, 2010)

Boise, ID -- Old Curly from the movie City Slickers liked to talk about “the one thing”. In trying to figure out why our country is so far off the right track, I tried to identify “the one thing”. Could there really be one thing?

   Believe it or not there is.

   You hear people all the time saying Washington is broken. Well yes it is and we are the ones who broke it. By 1913, in the midst of the Progressive movement, we were convinced that the founding fathers didn’t have it quite right. That because of corruption at the state level, we needed to tinker with the fundamental structure and balance of powers laid out in our Constitution. Boy did we have it wrong. Our country had a cold, we prescribed the medicine, and now it has pneumonia and is in critical condition.

   So, what is the one thing?

   The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution!

   This has been the biggest mistake our country ever made in terms of...  More...

Boise Trolley Folly DOES Justify Legislative Intervention
Dec 02, 2009

“If Reps Moyle and Labrador get their way, cities would need property owners’ approval before imposing an LID [Local Improvement District] to cover $1 million or more in bonds.” – Idaho Statesman

“Well…duh…yeah.  And what is so wrong about citizens having the right to vote for or against approving a million dollar tax upon themselves?  And in the case of Boise Mayor Bieter’s Trolley Folly tax, we’re talking $10 million to $15 million in additional downtown taxes on small business owners.  – FM Duck

Boise, ID  –  Whoa, girl friends, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  You’re not going to believe the bassackwards argument the Idaho Statesman editors put forth in last Tuesday’s “Our View” opinion column entitled, “Streetcar flap doesn’t justify ‘fix.’”

   If you want to gain an insight into how left Liberals think -- or rather how they typically go through the motions of trying to link up their disconnected thought globs to non sequitur conclusions -- listen to the backwards logic of the I.S. editors as they, first, presume that government entities (Idaho cities in this case) have inherent “rights” to implement taxation upon their citizens, rather than citizens having the right to control their governments, and then arrive at the conclusion that the state legislature doesn’t have the right to protect citizens from an overly abusive Boise City Council that wants to expand the definition of a Local Improvement District (LID) tax, to impose a huge new tax to the tune of $10 million to $15 million upon Boise’s downtown small business owners in order to jump start Boise Mayor Bieter’s federal money grab of $65 million for his new Trolley Folly.

   So what’s the big “flap?”

   Under current law, Idaho cities can tax a portion of their citizens by...  More...

3,000 Attend Boise's Anti-Tax Tea Party
Apr 16, 2009

Boise, ID – 2,500 - 3,000 Anti-Tax and Anti-Big Government Protesters marched down the main drag, Capitol Blvd, to the Idaho Statehouse in Boise, Idaho, yesterday at high noon.  FM Duck was there, too, singing the National Anthem off-key in A-Sharp Minor diminished 5th because that's what sounds best in the Pentatonic scale on an electric guitar.  I digress.

   Even the kids were protesting the U.S. Congress' failure to read, before they passed, former GOP President Bush's $1.2 Trillion Dollar TARP "Stimulus" Bailout Booty and current socialist President Barack Obama's $1.3 Trillion ARRA "Stimulus" Bill.

   Anti Big Govt and Pro-Freedom Americans from all political parties across the spectrum joined together, cranking up colorful signs to express their distaste for the current absurd inflationary direction that both the U.S. Congress and President Obama are dragging the economy.

   The above scenes were replicated in over a thousand cities across America yesterday as millions of average Americans took to the streets to tell politicians and the left Liberal news media what they thought about Obama and his little Keynesian economic boogers -- like U.S. Treasury Sec Tim Geithner and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke -- who are busy spending us into oblivion with trillions and trillions of Pulp Fiction Paper Dollars.  The major news media who, by the way, mostly skipped coverage of yesterday's demonstrations, continue to pretend that socialism and the quadrillion dollar federal bailouts are OK and even "necessary" to solve the current economic Depression, which they do not understand was caused by all the previous socialism, deficit financing, and quadrillion dollar government expenditures.  Most Americans, however, are not stupid and realize that trillion dollar federal bailouts printed up as Funny Money out of thin air and given to special interest businesses, as well as Obama's ongoing attempt to nationalize every industry in sight -- from banks, to cars, to insurance companies, to health care, to all Internet providers, to Victoria's Secrets Bra & Panty Shoppe, and the list goes on and on -- is insane.  In short, what Americans told the politicians yesterday was that they do not want to live under Obama's future economic fascism.  President Obama and Congress:  are you listening?

Boise’s Watergate morphs into Nampa's and Caldwell's Watergate to pay for Oregon community college in Idaho
(Nov 29, 2008)

 Former Idaho Supreme Court Justice Linda Copple Trout -- the same judge who suddenly switched lower court judges in the middle of the Boise Watergate scandal's Ada County Courthouse scam to allegedly "game" the outcome -- now rules via "judicial confirmation" that it's OK for the Nampa and Caldwell Urban Renewal Agencies to unconstitutionally go into multi-year debt without a 2/3 vote of the voters.

Dave Frazier, local citizen watch dog who won a recent Supreme Court battle vs. the same type of judicial shenanigans says it's not whether the project is "worthy" or "unworthy" in somebody's opinion, but rather how the project is funded.  Cities who use Urban Renewal Agencies to bypass the Idaho Constitution by pretending to be "private" institutions instead of "public" institutions (and thus exempt from spending law limits) are still in violation of the Idaho Constitution -- clever judges notwithstanding.

A second constitutional issue is:  why should Idahoans pay for an Oregon community college, TVCC -- especially since Ada and Canyon County taxpayers were recently tricked by a "gamed," targeted home mail-in ballot, off-date election, into paying for a new Idaho community college, College of Western Idaho, 9 miles away from Oregon's TVCC (Treasure Valley Community College) located within Idaho?

Boise, ID – Whoa, girl friends, pull up the floor and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java.  The tricky bureaucrats are after your wallets again.

   As predicted by author Deep Throat II in his 2006 book, Boise's Watergate: University Place & All The Governor's Men, if the crooks in Boise's Watergate were not brought to justice -- and they weren't -- there will be more and more Boise Watergates occurring throughout Idaho in the future.  More...

Sharon Ullman reclaims Ada County Commissioner seat
(Nov 6, 2008)

Boise, ID – Whoa, gather around, listen up and pour yourselves another hot cup of Rocket Java, girl friends.  Tax chopper Sharon Ullman (R-Ada County) kicked butt last Tuesday, booting out Democratic incumbent Paul "Lost-in-the-Forest" Woods who campaigned for more hiking trails and open space during the biggest Recession since the 1930s.

   "Hey, man," said Robert Finkenbinder of Boise, "I don't give no rodent's derriere about more hiking trails for everybody's dog to poop on during this giant Recession in which I just lost my job at Micron.  I just want my property taxes cut."

   "The real reason Paul Woods lost is because he worried too much about whether the deer and the antelope would roam all over our front lawns and he steadfastly refused to support saving the chocolate mousse," said Diana Chocoholic the III as she woofed down an Idaho Spud, a local chocolate treat sculpted in the shape of a potato to trick the tourists. -- FM Duck

What's Kempthorne hiding?
(Aug 06, 2008)

 The book Boise's Watergate: University Place & All The Governor's Men provides plenty of juicy information about the who, what, when, where, why, and how ex Gov Dirk Kempthorne participated in one of Idaho's most expensive financial fiascos in recent history, the failed $136 million University Place Scheme and its precursor Ada County Courthouse Scam.

Boise, ID – While the editors at the Idaho Statesman ponder the legality of the timeliness of ex Gov, now Sec of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne's disinclination to give up his gubernatorial records to Idaho's Historical Society as required by law, FM Duck ponders the more pressing question:  namely, what's Kempthorne hiding?

   Instead of forking the papers over to the Historical Society as required by law, why does Kempthorne want to donate his 7 years of records, 500 boxes worth, to the University of Idaho and keep them sealed for 25 years?

   Every previous Idaho governor donated their gubernatorial records to the Historical Society almost immediately upon leaving office.  But not Kempthorne whose legacy may well turn out to be his questionable actions in Boise's Watergate.  The book Boise's Watergate: University Place & All The Governor's Men provides plenty of juicy information about the who, what, when, where, why, and how ex Gov Dirk Kempthorne participated in one of Idaho's most expensive financial fiascos in recent history, the failed $136 million University Place Scheme and its precursor Ada County Courthouse Scam.

   The problem is not -- as the Statesman puts it -- that state law has not set a more timely deadline for turning over the papers.  Kempthorne -- as well as any other Idaho governor who might have something to hide -- could just as easily speed up the culling out and destruction of culpable papers under whatever time frame was established, so timeliness is not really the issue.

   The real issue remains:  What is kempthorne trying to hide by not releasing his past gubernatorial records?  Especially suspicious is his desire to keep them sealed for 25 years. -- FM Duck

Idaho Statesman's parent newspaper profits melting faster than subprime snowballs in hell
(July 27, 2008)

McClatchy's shares plunge from $51 per share in 2006 to $4.74 last Thursday on the NYSE. 

Managing Editor Kevin Richert sobs hysterically after losing special bathroom privileges and reserved parking spot under old oak tree in northwest corner of parking lot.

Columnist-Reporter Dan Popcorn forced to trade in 1943 manual Royal black typewriter for paper pad and pencil sans eraser.

Boise, ID – "I told McClatchy not to borrow $3 billion to buy out Knight-Ridder, Inc. in 2006," said Idaho Statesman frequent contributor FM Duck writing under the pseudonym of Mr. Quack Off, "but did they listen?  No.  Now look at where they are:  bankrupt with their stock falling faster than a quark on anabolic steroids driving a HEMI Mopar in Stanford's Linear Accelerator just off the 280 freeway on the San Francisco peninsula."

   McClatchy Co., publisher of 30 left liberal daily newspapers whose managers know zippo about the difference between gold and paper, how to spell F-e-d-e-r-a-l  R-e-s-e-r-v-e, or why the market is collapsing, reported its net income fell 44% to $19.7 million this year.  Idaho publisher Little Annie Fannie, publisher of McClatchy's southpaw newspaper The Idaho Statesman, fainted after ding-dong the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange left its parent newspaper's stock down by 24-cents, or 4.8%, at $4.74 per share.

   "Dang," said Idaho Statesman publisher Little Annie Fannie, "Mad Cramer on CNBC said it was OK to invest in financials, subprime mortgages, auction rate securities, default swaps, Bear Stearns, Tamarack Resort, and hard copy newspapers during The Current Recession.  I just don't know what's happening or where the U.S. economy is going," she added.  "Maybe the Federal Reserve should pump more non-collateralized Funny Money into the newspaper industry, just like the home mortgage industry.  We need to force Shakespeare and Barack Obama down everybody's collective throats," said Fannie, searching the rotating ceiling fan for a clue.

   "Yeah, and speaking of Fannie, what we need is a Funny Paper Mae and a Freddie Big Mac newspaper bailout to save the readers of America," said columnist-reporter Dan Popcorn, who just lost his manual typewriter in the latest McClatchy stock collapse debacle.

   "That's right, I mean left," said Managing Editor Kevin Richert, who reportedly cried hysterically when told he would no longer get to use the Idaho Statesman's private toity facilities or a reserved parking spot under the famous old oak tree in the Statesman parking lot.

   "McClatchy's revenue fell more than 19% in June, the company's worst monthly decline this year, so we're cutting back on toilet paper," said Idaho Statesman publisher Little Annie Fannie, "and we're thinking about chopping down Kevin's shady oak tree for firewood this winter -- unless, of course, Secretary of the Interior Dork Kempwood put oak trees on the Endangered Species List with the burgeoning 25,000 polar bear population, one of which was last seen tap dancing on top of BP-Alyeska's oil pipeline, licking his chops while scoping out the 10,000 caribou lunch possibilities lolli-gagging around Prudhoe Bay's oil fields."

   McClatchy said it will probably drop the company's non-existent stock dividends, which cost $59 million last year.

   "Oh great, does that mean I get to log on with my paper pad and pencil from home?" asked reporter Dan Popcorn. -- FM Duck 

Idaho Gov Butch Otter wants to jack up car registration fees by 600%
(Feb 27, 2008)

Boise, ID – Whoa, listen up, girl friends.  While Idaho housing foreclosures jumped 92% -- from 382 in Jan 2007 to 735 in Jan 2008 -- and the state is sitting on a $200 million surplus, Gov Butch Otter, the fake Libertarian, proposed a 400 - 600% increase in car registration fees for every good citizen in Idaho.  Yesterday, you paid $24 - $48 bucks a year.  If the state Legies pass Otter's proposal, everybody gets to pay one flat fee:  $150.  What for?  To maintain Idaho's roads.

   I don't know about you but I think it's time for a highway tax revolt.  We have already shown Gov Ottocrat how to solicit private companies -- such as Macquerie of Australia -- to pay Idaho to build privately-run toll roads.  We do not need to raise registration fees, or increase Idaho's gas tax, or stupidly go into more debt for former Gov Kempthorne's GARVEE federal highway loans to build or maintain our highways.  Private enterprise will pay us and they will make a profit AND the roads will be built on time and under budget.

   Our economy is in a recession.  We need to cut taxes and spending, not raise taxes.  Idaho should immediately refund the $200 million surplus to the taxpayers.  Idaho should immediately cut all taxes on food, medical, and levy no Internet taxes.  Idaho should immediately either chop the property tax or freeze it in a constitutional Prop 13 California style.  Idaho should immediately chop all corporate and individual income taxes and extend the sales tax to ALL services and commodities (except food, medical, and the Internet) at no higher than 3%.  Later, we can adjust the 3% up or down, but for now this would provide more than enough revenue to cover current legitimate state costs.

   Since Idaho's ridiculous public education expenditures gobble up 65% of Idaho's $3 billion budget, we should cut all new increases in Pub Ed expenses -- including Superintendent Tom Luna's $20 - $40 million proposal for a pretended free market Teacher's Bonus for teachers who teach to Idaho's bankrupt ISAT tests.  Further, we need to cut all the waste, fraud, and abuse in the current Pub Ed system.  For example, Idaho spends over $72 million for school buses that drive all over hell and back with only a 25% occupancy.  Most high school students drive themselves to school.  Elementary students are driven by Mom.  This is only one example.  There are tons of redundant Pub Ed programs gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars.  Chop 'em.  Now.

   Wake up Idahoans.  We are in a recession.  You can either voluntarily cut the spending or the market will force you to cut the spending.  You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip... or a potato.

   Instead of jacking car registration fees by a whopping 600%, let's try private enterprise to build and maintain our roads.  Chicago did.  They bailed out of a huge debt and added $500 million in surplus from a private toll road company.  So can we.  Free minds, free markets. -- FM Duck

Idaho legislators Crapo, Craig & Simpson sing, "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me" as they rob all Americans to pay for Idaho earmarks
(Sep 13, 2007)

Boise, ID – Our economics-challenged legislators either have no clue about where the true value of money comes from or they are pirates of the Caribbean robbing Peter in New York to pay Paul in Idaho.  Meanwhile, the politicians in New York are busy robbing Paul in Idaho to pay Peter in New York.

   How much booty are Craig, Crapo, and Simpson trying to loot for Idaho?  $12 million for 12 projects:

$200K - Boise detox center
$250K - BSU geothermal
$200K - Pocatello Rec Center
$250K - Twin Falls Boys Club
$500K - Hwy 30 improvements
$1.25M - Boise Airport
$1.5M - I-84 improvement
$5M - City of Rocks Byway
$4.52M - Mass transportation
$800K - ISU Student Safety
$450K - historical preserve
$400K - Lewiston School Dist

and $43 million for 18 more projects at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), BSU, U of Idaho, and various Idaho companies.

   Whether the billions of dollars in pork barrel earmarks stuffed into Congressional Appropriations and Defense Bills come from direct taxation or are printed up out of thin air by the private Federal Reserve, it affects all Americans in all fifty states in many different ways, from devaluation of the unit dollar to price inflation.

   Deficit financed earmarks are simply an extension of the concept of counterfeiting, or creating non-backed, non-collateralized, paper currency out of thin air.  This is called fiat currency, or "forced" currency, and is what governments typically do when they dump the gold standard to control the people in a nation.

   This is a clever way for the private central bankers and their politician friends to create paper money and its subsidiary Wall Street derivatives (such as sub prime mortgages and other non-backed commercial paper) without the nasty restriction of paper money being a receipt for gold or any other hard commodity.  Simply redefine money as paper.  That way, the central bankers and the politicians can manipulate votes (with Congressional earmarks as pork for their home states) and manipulate the economy to their advantage -- at least until the next recession caused by their fiat monetary policies, the result of which they will blame on the non-existent free market.

   It used to be considered rotten -- and illegal -- to trick the people with currency manipulation.  Now, however, politicians such as Idaho Senators Larry "I have a wide stance" Craig and Mike Crapo, and Rep. Mike Simpson, are proud to rob Americans in all the other 49 states for Idaho's Porky the Pig local projects.  Meanwhile, 500 politicians in each of the other 49 states are also busy robbing Americans in Idaho and all the other 49 states (including their own) for their own Porky the Pig local projects.

   Here's a suggestion:  instead of sneaking billions of dollars of earmarks into Appropriations and Defense Bills every year for home projects, it would be easier if our Pirates of the Caribbean Congressjerks simply awarded themselves Jr. Federal Printing Presses to print up whatever amount of non-backed paper money -- sorta like sub-prime pork -- they think they might need for their local flower gardens, Bridges to Nowhere, and subsidized Girl Scout Cookie sales. -- FM Duck

Ooh, another "National Emergency"... Idaho Senators Crapo & Craig rip off American taxpayers with $2 million federal grant for laid-off Micron workers in Boise
(Sep 12, 2007)

Boise, ID – Will the national robbery never end?  If it's not Congressional earmarks to build an Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere for $240 million, it's $2 million for Boise's Micron to pay for laid-off workers after the Idaho State legislators granted Micron an $800 thousand or million -- what's a coupla hundred million between friends? -- property tax exemption deal when Micron pretended it was going to build a billion dollar computer chip plant in Boise while knowingly (and simultaneously) building the real plant in China.

   And all this after Micron was indicted recently -- but not fined for hundreds of millions of dollars like their cohorts because they blew the whistle on their co-conspirators Hynix, Samsung, and others -- by the feds for simultaneously "dumping" and setting monopoly prices (if that's possible) for DRAMs.

   Administered separately by Idaho's Dept of Labor, an additional federal welfare grant has been requested by Micron from a Trade Adjustment Assistance program, also in the U.S. Dept of Labor.

   Hey, let's all pretend that money grows on cherry trees in Washington DC and that when all 50 states receive billions in welfare grants from the federal government, it isn't hyperinflation of our non-backed dollar and doesn't devalue the fake paper money in your grandma's savings account. -- FM Duck

New Community College to "game" the accreditation system to get federal funds
(Aug 7, 2007)

Boise, ID – Oink, oink.  Listen up, gather round, and shut up girl friends.  Pour yourself another hot cup of Rocket Java.  The tricky politicians are at it again.

   Remember when the YES Campaign for the Community College politicians (1) set up a "special election" before your property tax assessments came out, (2) gamed the election with Absentee Ballots to allow regular voters to vote from home, and (3) gamed the Community College Trustee selection process by the State Board of Education with what columnist Dan Popkey called "an inside job"  (see 07-18-2007  "The fix was in... But that's OK; This case warranted an inside job." -- Dan Popkey, Idaho Statesman  More... )?  Well don't look now but the new Trustees -- 4 out of 5 who were Co-chair or members of the YES Campaign group -- are looking at gaming a fast track to accreditation by using BSU professors as temporary teachers to gain quick acceptance by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities AND, more importantly, access to federal funds.

   And that, mes amies, will soon become the major issue:  follow the money.  BSU previously applied to the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation for $71 million to establish a Community College but the Albertson Foundation has pledged only $10 million to the new Community College if, and only after, a reasonable plan has been drafted.  The YES Campaigners who promised taxpayers that it would only cost $12.00 per $100,000 in property tax assessments, are already a year late (missing the 2009 budget deadline) and $56 million short.  And now the Trustees are already talking about the maximum property tax of $125 per $100,000 assessment to reach their public education robbery, which is exactly what the NO Campaigners said might happen.

   As FM Duck has already stated, if the YES Campaigners gamed the system to allow less than 10% of the population to raise property taxes on the other 90%, why wouldn't we expect them to carry that same moral philosophy into their jobs as Trustees?  What's next: a primer on how to cheat on final exams? -- FM Duck

Move over Alaska, U.S. Rep Sali (R-Boise) earmarks $400,000 for 12-bed Boise Detox Center to Nowhere
(July 25, 2007)

Holy Mackerel, when did GOP Rep Bill Sali morph into a tax & spend Liberal?

Boise, ID – Whoa, wait a minute, Margie.  Pour yourself another cup of Rocket Java.  According to the Idaho Statesman, our newest GOP Rep to the U.S.  Congress, Bill Sali, thinks it's OK to tax all the citizens across America to pay for the construction of a 12-bed detox center in Boise, Idaho.

   Huh?

   Sali, supposed defender of private enterprise, the free market, and limited government has now met his left Liberal enemies in Washington DC and guess what?  Now he are one.  Huyuck.

   Last year, the dominant GOP Congress sneakily shoved over 15,000 earmarks into non-related legislation to bring the pork back to their home districts.  This year, the dominant Demo Congress has cranked up some 23,000 earmarks with no end in sight.  So if it walks like a statist, talks like a statist, acts like a statist, then guess what: it's probably a freaking statist.

   The U.S. has now reached a moral and financial dilemma as both GOP and left Liberal Congressman think the U.S. Dollar grows "for free" on cherry blossom trees in Washington DC.  And you thought GOP Sali was a fiscal Conservative?  Think again, Idahoans. There's not a dime's worth of difference between the basic moral philosophy of the Liberals and the Conservatives.

   But, if the above reporting from the Idaho Statesman is correct, Sali is now worse than the Liberals.  As a gung-ho Bible  Banger who pushed for anti Gay and anti Women's rights and is pro Faith-Based legislation to strip you of your social rights, he is now pushing to strip you of your economic rights, too.  Taxing one group of Americans in Hoboken, NJ, and Santa Monica, CA, to build a 12-bed detox center for another group of Americans in Boise, Idaho, is not free market.  At least the socialist Welfare State Liberals support individual social rights.

   As we've hinted at over and over in these pages, the moral and economic downfall of America will not come from the left Liberals but rather from the Bible Banging Right -- and all in the name of an anthropomorphized God. -- FM Duck

Bye-bye Micron, thanks for the memories... chips, that is
(Jun 30, 2007)

Boise, ID – Has anybody noticed a growing trend in Boise lately?  Big businesses are leaving in droves.

   First, CEO Bill and Mary Agee ran Morrison-Knudsen into the ground.  MK then morphed into WGI, which was recently bought by California giant RUS or SRU or Toys R Us.  Then, Boise Cascade bit the dust as CEO George Harad took his $20 million for merging BCC with Office Max and selling out to private firm Madison-Dearborn, which is busy dismantling what's left of BCC.

   Next to bite the Boise dust was Albertson's Grocery stores whose CEO took his $20 million or so and said they couldn't compete against Wal- Mart.  Albertson's sold out to Super Value.  SV moved Albertson's out of state and in one year has turned the stores around into profitability.

   This year Boise's Hewlett-Packard Printing Division has a problem: nobody is printing on paper.  Oh-oh, HP may have to re-invent or dump the printer or dum-da-dum-dum move out of Boise.

   And now, for desert, we have Idaho's largest private corporation announcing a denial of a denial that it will not be needing that special interest corporate welfare property tax exemption from ex Gov Kempthorne and the state legies.  Plus, Micron will not be needing all those future local Community College graduates for its Die-Chip-Frame assembly lines because it's moving its fabrication plants to China and Singapore and freezing all U.S. employee hires.  Plus, several thousand Boise Micron employees will be laid off soon.  Real soon.  Like now.

   Quite frankly, we don't really give a rat's derriere what Micron does because (1) we are free market capitalists at FM Duck, (2) we are not "It Takes A Village" socialist cheerleaders like the editors down at the Idaho Statesman, and (3) we understand that it is in the best interests of everybody in a global free market to produce and trade where one can make the best profit.

   But what we do object to is the constant special interest corporate welfare that the Idaho legislature and executive branch grants to big companies who know full well at the time they lobby for their corporate welfare that they will be moving out of the state to China and elsewhere, and thus increasing taxes -- to make up for the loss -- on residential homeowners.  It's the Big Lie that we object to, not the free market move. -- FM Duck

Boise Mayor Dave Bieter confuses self with Walt Disney, wants taxpayers to finance Whitewater Playground
(Jun 18, 2007)

Boise, ID – "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me."  That's right taxpayers.  Left Liberal Boise Mayor Dave Bieter has morphed into Walt Disney, confused the proper roles of govt and private enterprise, and thinks the government should build a Whitewater Theme Park in Boise.

   Yahoo, Goofy!  What's next, Indiana Jones and The Boise Temple of Doom?

   The big question is, "Twinkle, twinkle, Mayor Dave, how I wonder how much we'll pay?"  Try $1.5 million in taxes, for starters. Total estimate for Mayor Goofy's Whitewater Theme Park is $8 million: $1.5 million from Boise taxpayers and $6.5 million from Peter Pan and Tinker Bell private donations, which may or may not materialize.  Which means The Pirates of the Boise Caribbean will tax the crap out of its citizens to make up the difference.

   "This is one of the happiest days for the city of Boise," announced Mayor Goofy.  Huyuck.

   Meanwhile. the socialist cheerleaders down at the Idaho Statesman are, of course, cheering Mayor Goofy on as they sing, "It's A Small Tax After All," and couch their announcement of Mayor Bieter's Splash Mountain as if it's (1) a legitimate project for the City of Boise to blow taxpayer money on, and (2) a long overdue necessity that has been lagging behind and must get going quickly or we may all die from lack of enough governmental spending.

   Statesman headlines cry, "Bieter Wants Money To Get Whitewater Park Moving... Proposed budget calls for $750,000 for long-stalled playground for kayakers on the Boise River."  I wonder what Boise's private water park in Meridian, Roaring Springs, thinks about having to help finance its new government competitor through taxation?

   Next on Mayor Goofy's Alice in Wonderland agenda: Mad Hatter Tea Party down at Boise City Hall with Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee, and the Cheshire Cat standing on his own head -- and your wallet. -- FM Duck

How to Game an Idaho Election
by Henny Penny at Animal Farm
(May 23, 2007)

Boise, ID – According to the Idaho Statesman's latest census sources, 1.4 million people live in Idaho, 615,500 people live in Ada and Canyon Counties in Boise's Treasure Valley, and  262,000 K-12 students live in Idaho.  Doing the math, we can extrapolate that 19% of Idahoans are younger than 18 years old and 81% are adults who can vote.  81% of the population in the Treasure Valley who can vote, therefore, equals roughly 498,555 or, say, 500,000.  But let's be generous and lower that to 400,000 adults who can vote in Ada and Canyon Counties.

   Now comes the interesting part, Margie.  In yesterday's vote to establish a blank spending check and no specific location for a new Community College system in the Treasure Valley, 31,500 voters said YES and 14,500 voters said NO.  Since the election needed a super-majority of 66 2/3% of those who voted -- not of those who were eligible or registered to vote, there's a big difference -- to pass, the Yeas got 68.4% and the NoWayJoses got 31.5%.  The No Shows, those who did not show up to vote, totaled approximately 354,000, or 88.5%.

   This means that only 11.5% of the adult population of Ada and Canyon Counties, a tiny minority, got to raise everybody's property taxes in the Boise area.  In other words, a Democratic Minority Rule of about 10% gets to dictate what could turn into a huge property tax increase for 90% of the Boise area population.

   Is this what our Founding Fathers meant when they created a limited republic?  Is this what is meant by "No Taxation Without Representation?"  This is worse than Democratic Majority Rule which is truly a "tyranny of the majority."  Clearly, Idaho's political system is broken when even in a super-majority election required to increase taxes, a minority of 10% can force 90% into something they did not vote for.

   Now, you rebut, "So why didn't the 400,000 eligible voters in Ada and Canyon Counties show up to vote NO?  My answer is twofold: (1) because they shouldn't have to show up to vote NO, and (2) the current special interest groups in Idaho are cleverly "gaming" the system.

   Let me explain.

   In (1) above, we need to change the Constitution in Idaho to state that a majority must be 51% of the ELIGIBLE or REGISTERED voters and a super majority must be 66 2/3% of the same.  It makes more sense to define "voter representation" as the "registered" voters, not just those who show up to vote.  To pass a law -- especially a law to spend and tax with a blank check -- Idaho should require a majority or super majority of the voting population to approve it.  If people don't want a new law, they should not have to show up to vote no; staying at home should suffice.  As with the Bill of Rights, the onus is not on the NO voters to always have to go to the polls to try to prevent an infringement upon their rights or protecting their money from the tax collector at every whipstitch minute but rather it is on the YES voters trying to shove taxing and spending down everybody else's throats.  And the YES voters should represent a majority or super majority of the registered voters, not just those who happen to know about the "special election" and show up to vote.

   Which brings us to point # (2) above:  the current special interest groups in Idaho are cleverly "gaming" the system.

   How?

   Idaho's special interest groups, in yesterday case it was the Public Education lobbyists, are allowed by law to set up a "special election" not on one of the regular 4 election days in Idaho.  That way, no official notice is required to be mailed out to the voters by the Sec of State.  If you don't subscribe to the socialist Idaho Statesman newspaper or watch local TV news -- many people today obtain their news from the Internet instead -- then you may not know about the "special election."  That's step one.

   Step two by the clever lobbyists is to mis-use Idaho's Absentee Ballots.  Absentee Ballots mean exactly what they say: ballots for Idahoans who will be "absent" from Idaho and can't make it to the polls to vote.  Business trips, vacations, on duty fighting a War in Iraq are examples.   Instead, the Secretary of State's wife who works directly as his nepotistic Admin sent out private PAC brochures to first INFORM a select group of thousands of voters that a "special election" will be occurring, and second, a campaign brochure which not only urges the recipient to vote YES, but also includes a convenient form to obtain an Absentee Ballot to vote from home.

   In short, officials from the state and others acting in a private capacity, notified only a select group of voters about a "special election" and then provided them with the means to vote from home.  This is truly a mis-use of the Absentee Ballot by special interests to "game" their "special election."

   Meanwhile, our 4th Estate, the socialist cheerleaders down at the Idaho Statesman, cheers the culprits on and celebrates what amounts to election fraud and a total misrepresentation of what our Founding Fathers meant when they established a limited constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights to protect infringements upon the rights of the smallest minority possible: the individual.

   Clearly the political voting system in Idaho is broken and it needs to be fixed pronto. -- FM Duck