December 16, 2010 by Robert Ringer
Since the Transportation Security Administration began its Barney Frank Anti-Terrorist Fondling operation, a whole lot of people who heretofore had appeared to be immune to the Tea Party virus have begun to awaken from their Oprah slumber.
By “Oprah slumber,” I’m referring metaphorically to the Orwellian scene that occurred when Oprah Winfrey told a recent audience that each of them would be receiving a new Volkswagen Beetle. As the omnibenevolent queen of mass-audience hypnotism shrieked the good news to her adoring flock, both men and women went into a frenzy that made the reaction to the 1964 U.S. invasion of the singing Beatles seem like a church outing by comparison.
On hearing the news, the lucky folks who had come to the studio thinking they were in for nothing more than a standard dose of mind-numbing talk-show chatter began screaming, laughing, hugging, waving their arms wildly and, yes, crying. Some even got down on their knees, apparently to praise the almighty Goddess of Stuff who giveth free Beetles to total strangers.
After viewing Oprah’s version of Brazil’s Carnival on YouTube, I expressed my bewilderment to a friend, only to have him say, "Hey, I can understand people getting excited about being on the receiving end of a new car. Nothing abnormal about that."
Alas, he missed the point. I, too, can understand why a person would get excited about someone giving him a new car, but what I witnessed was way beyond mere excitement. It was something akin to C.S. Lewis’ pure joy. It was the kind of ecstasy one might expect to see in people who have just been informed that the Messiah has returned to earth.
In other words, neither excitement nor happiness was the issue. The issue was that the reaction was way out of proportion to the news. It bothered me because it was yet another reminder that Americans — and most of what is left of the so-called civilized world — have lost their way (and, one might justifiably argue, their minds).
It was right up there with sports fans wildly cheering multimillionaire athletes, movie buffs worshipping Hollywood actors who appear as experts before Congress and the walking dead who camp out in front of Best Buy for the privilege of purchasing "stuff" as early in the morning as possible.
Following the show, Volkswagen of America CEO Jonathan Browning unwittingly gave an excellent insight into the madness when he issued a statement that said, in part, "Oprah Winfrey and the Volkswagen Beetle are two American icons, so when the Oprah show approached us with this incredible opportunity to share her Beetle experience with deserving viewers, we instantly wanted to be a part of it."
Question: What the hell is a "deserving viewer?" Is every viewer deserving? Of what? Why? The reason an intelligent CEO of a major corporation would say something so eminently silly is that the masses must be constantly told they are deserving… they are entitled… they are, above all, "hard-working Americans" — even if they’re receiving unemployment benefits.
There’s no question that children respond well to this kind of reassurance. The only problem is that these were not children. They were adults!
The whole thing was reminiscent of a scene from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when Mustapha Mond, the supreme government power holder, said to the awed and confused Savage from the Indian reservation, "The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg — eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"And they’re happy below the water line?" asked the Savage.
"Happier than above it," replied Mustapha Mond.
Those shrieking people in Oprah’s audience are below the water line — way below. And when you’re below the water line, your mind is filled with thoughts of free stuff, today’s reality-show lineup and the latest rumors that Brett Favre will soon be forced into a nursing home. These are the kinds of blissful thoughts that make for a happy savage.
Which brings me back to the TSA’s Barney Frank Anti-Terrorist Fondling operation. When the reality that a Marxist had moved into the White House began setting in with people, millions spontaneously rebelled and became part of a new Tea Party movement.
But millions more refused to come to grips with what was happening before their very eyes. They rejected the notion that Barack Obama was anything but a personable chap who had, bless his youthful heart, simply flirted with far-left ideology as a college kid. Van Jones, Anita Dunn, John Holdren, Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, et al were simply figments of Glenn Beck’s imagination.
Now, however, as a result of the TSA’s police-state tactics, I believe a second wave of people are ripe prospects for the Tea Party rebellion. And it may not be a peaceful rebellion if the Feds don’t reign in the perverts who are molesting our wives, our mothers, our children and our grandchildren.
At the recent New Orleans Investment Conference, I participated in the "Summit on America’s Future" panel discussion with Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. When the moderator, Gary Alexander, asked if we thought America’s decline as a great civilization was inevitable, Krauthammer summed it up perfectly: "Decline is a choice. It’s not inevitable."
Meaning, in the end, it’s strictly up to us. We can continue to be the United States of Stuff, with our minds below the water line, or we can wake up, grow up and push back hard against an oppressive government. At the end of the day, it’s a clear choice between submission and all-out resistance in an effort to re-establish the foundations of our once free and proud republic.
Beetles be damned, if we could accomplish the latter, that would be a legitimate reason for being ecstatic.
–Robert Ringer
November 15, 2010 by Bob Livingston
The United States financial system is a rickety, leaking boat, and rather than bailing it out, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is pouring more water in.
The signs of the sinking system are coming on furiously now. The price of gold tells the story. The state of the “too big to fail” banks is another sign.
Saved from the fate it deserved by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s infusion of $45 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Bank of America sucked up the criminal enterprise Countrywide Financial and claimed all was well. Just over a year later it paid back the loan. That was last December.
But since mid-April the bank’s stock price has dropped more than 40 percent. And the value of its outstanding stock is currently at around half of what it should be based on its “book value” — what the company says its holdings are worth, according to the website AlterNet.
Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil writes that mortgage-bond investors are demanding untold billions of dollars in refunds, the foreclosure fiasco is metastasizing and a member of the TARP oversight panel is openly worried that BoA may need another bailout.
In other words, the bank is on the brink of another collapse. And it may not be alone.
At 1 a.m. on Nov. 8, ATMs across the country shut down. The problems affected the larger financial institutions like BoA, BBVA Compass, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Suntrust, American Express, BB&T and others. While the excuse given blamed the change from Daylight Savings Time, many in the blogosphere wondered if it wasn’t a prelude to a rumored coming banking holiday to allow for a devaluation of the dollar.
Coming just days after Helicopter Ben announced he wanted to dump another $600 billion into the system in order to spur inflation, the bank holiday/devaluation threat is not farfetched.
In fact, there are reports that a person was told by a bank manager that banks would close for an undetermined amount of time, and that when the banks reopened withdrawals by checks would be limited to $500 per week regardless of the balance in the account.
The last bank holiday in the U.S. occurred on March 9, 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed the banks and Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 under the guise of reorganizing insolvent banks and reopening those strong enough to survive. FDR used the holiday to confiscate gold from the citizenry and devalue the dollar. The Federal Reserve committed unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks.
The Act gave the Treasury Secretary the authority to order any individual or organization in the U.S. to deliver any gold they possessed to the U.S. Treasury. Also the Fed was authorized to steal 10 percent of any “check, draft, banker acceptance, etc.” by converting them into cash at 90 percent of their value.
It was out-and-out theft. Today the theft continues.
The dollar is crashing and inflation is ramping up. Anyone buying groceries knows this. Even former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin knows it. But the ruling elite — including Helicopter Ben — want to hide it from you. And they try to do it by lying to you.
Sarah Palin on Monday [Nov. 8] made a speech at a trade-association convention in Phoenix urging Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to “cease and desist” his “pump priming”. Palin said the United States, “shouldn’t be playing around with inflation.” She went on to say, "All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher."
After obtaining a copy of her speech, the Wall Street Journal’s Sudeep Reddy wrote an article criticizing Palin’s comments about food inflation, saying that, "Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record." NIA [National Inflation Association] finds it unfortunate that Reddy has been brainwashed into believing the government’s phony consumer price index (CPI) numbers.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)’s CPI is not a reliable indicator of U.S. food inflation or any type of price inflation. NIA estimates the real rate of annual food inflation in the U.S. to already be 5% and projects that this rate will rise above 10% in early 2011. NIA believes the BLS has been using both geometric weighting and hedonics to artificially manipulate the CPI downward. The U.S. government has a strong motivation to keep CPI increases as low as possible because since the year 1975, retired Americans receive annual Social Security payment increases that are tied to the CPI. NIA calculates that based on the way the BLS’s CPI has understated the real rate of price inflation, Americans on Social Security should be receiving payments that are more than double what they receive today. Unfortunately, the government just announced last month that Americans on Social Security will receive no payment increase in 2011, despite the fact that food inflation will likely become the biggest crisis of the year, much larger than the mortgage crisis we have today.
When calculating food inflation, the government uses deceptive geometric weighting, which gives a lower weighting to goods that are rising in price and a higher weighting to goods that are falling in price. If the price of steak is rising while the price of hamburgers is falling, the CPI will give a lower weighting to steak and a higher weighting to hamburgers. The government justifies this by saying that expensive steak prices mean Americans are more likely to eat hamburgers. Therefore, the CPI no longer accounts for the price to maintain the same standard of living. The CPI is now calculated based on the realization that America’s standard of living has been in decline and the expectation that it will continue to decline in the future. — National Inflation Association.
The NIA is predicting massive inflation very soon as a result of Helicopter Ben’s latest escapade. It says that grocery stores will soon charge $11.43 for an ear of corn, $23.05 for a 24-ounce loaf of wheat bread, $62.21 for a 32-ounce package of Domino Granulated Sugar, $24.31 for a 32-ounce container of soy milk, $77.71 for a 11.30-ounce container of Folgers Classic Roast Coffee, $45.71 for a 64-ounce container of Minute Maid Orange Juice and $15.50 for a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate 1.55-ounce candy bar. NIA also projects that by the end of this decade, a plain white men’s cotton t-shirt at Wal-Mart will cost $55.57.
The dollar is on its way out as the world’s sole reserve currency. According to the Financial Times, “Almost everyone involved in the international financial system agrees long-term change is inevitable: the rise of China will surely mean that the dollar cannot continue to be the world’s sole reserve currency.”
The elites are doing all they can to prop up the current failed system. It won’t work.
The American middle class is being impoverished by U.S. dollar depreciation. Will they realize it before Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner begins adding zeros to the currency, or will it be after?
Bob Livingston is an ultra-conservative American who has been writing a newsletter for 41 years. Bob has devoted much of his life to research and the quest for truth on a variety of subjects. Bob specializes in health issues such as nutritional supplements and alternatives to drugs, as well as issues of privacy (both personal and financial), asset protection and the preservation of freedom.
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COMMENTARY
Has History Passed Obama By?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Barack Obama’s dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term?
Losing Your Head at the Supreme Court
By L. Brent Bozell III
Thirty-two states are inhibiting the freedom of minors to tan, and no one cares. But interfere with their right to fry their minds with ultra-violent, sadistic video games, and there’s hell to pay. Video-game manufacturers don’t want politicians tampering with their sales to minors, so here comes the march of the First Amendment fundamentalists, who argue that the principle of freedom of speech covers the enthusiastic distribution and sale of every kind of child-corrupting media horror.
Voters Speak: No to Soak-the-Rich Schemes
By Michelle Malkin
Do Americans share President Obama’s desire to impose redistributive social justice on the well off? In liberal Washington State, of all places, voters gave a definitive answer this Tuesday: No! The resounding rejection of a punitive “Robin Hood” initiative shows that it’s not just red-state Republicans who oppose extreme tax hikes on the nation’s wealth generators.
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