The US government is bankrupting our economy by burning through hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of bailouts to Paulson and Cheney cronies. American Express is getting bailout money?Seriously? American Express could vanish off the face of the Earth and we’d hardly notice. I think it telling though, that American Express’ customers can’t pay their bills.
The government needs to focus on saving businesses that could still be saved and are worth saving. And Robert Reich has some choice words about the bailout …
When a big company that gets into trouble is more valuable living than dead, there used to be a well-established legal process for reorganizing it - called chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. Under it, creditors took some losses, shareholders even bigger ones, some managers’ heads rolled. Companies cleaned up their books and got a fresh start. And taxpayers didn’t pay a penny.
So why, exactly, is the Treasury substituting government bailouts for chapter 11? Even if you assume Wall Street’s major banks and insurance giant AIG are so important to the national and global economy that they can’t be allowed to fail, that doesn’t mean they have to be bailed out. They could be reorganized under bankruptcy protection. True, their creditors, shareholders, and executives would take bigger hits than they’re taking now that taxpayers are bailing them out. But they’re the ones who took the risk. We didn’t.
The Treasury seems to have lost sight of its real client. It’s client is not the creditors, shareholders, or executives of any of these firms. Its sole client is the American people.
So is the automobile industry one of those industries that should be saved with bailout money rather than through bankrupcty? I don’t know. But I do notice that people who were amazingly eager to throw bailout money at banks, money which then went to pay for fatcats’ bonuses, are lining up in lockstep to say the automobile industry can’t be saved.
Here are some news stories I find interesting today …
US ECONOMY
Best Buy Cuts Full-Year Profit Forecast on `Seismic’ Slowdown in Spending Best Buy Co., the largest U.S. electronics retailer, said full-year profit will be lower than it expected because of the recent turmoil in the financial markets and the U.S. economic slump
U.S. Slump May Be Longest in Three Decades as Economy `Fell Off a Cliff’ The U.S. downturn will be the longest in three decades, and the drought in consumer spending may be the worst ever, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
CHINA
BHP’s West Australian Iron Ore Exports Decline 7.6% as China Demand Wanes BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest mining company, exported 7.6 percent less iron ore from Western Australia in October amid a slowdown in demand from China.
Retail Sales Climb 22% in China as Crisis Fails to Damp Consumer Spending China’s retail sales rose 22 percent, close to the fastest pace in nine years, signaling that domestic demand may help the fourth-biggest economy withstand a looming global recession.
ENERGY
Oil Falls to 20-Month Low on Expected U.S. Supply Gain as Demand Weakens Crude oil fell to a 20-month low on forecasts that a report will show U.S. crude inventories grew last week as the worsening economy wears down energy demand.
World Must Find a Kuwait a Year to Meet Demand, Replace Fields, IEA Says The world must find an extra 64 million barrels a day of oil production by 2030, equivalent to replacing Kuwait’s output every year, to meet demand growth and counter the decline of existing fields, the International Energy Agency said.
China Plans to Spend at Least $27 Billion on Energy Projects in Future China, the world’s second-biggest oil consumer, will spend at least 188.5 billion yuan ($27 billion) to build six energy projects including a natural gas link and nuclear power plants to spur economic expansion.
OPEC President: We May Cut Again If Oil Falls Further
“If the prices continue their decline most probably OPEC will have to take a further decision on a cut in supply,” Khelil told Reuters.
Related Posts
- Wednesday News Roundup (10/15/08)
- Wednesday News Roundup (05/07/08)
- Wednesday News Roundup (09/03/08)
- Wednesday News Roundup (08/13/08)
- Wednesday News Roundup — ‘Buy China,’ Falling Oil Prices, Dollar Doom, and More (06/17/09)



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HOW TO REDUCE THE NATIONAL DEBT
People are making this much harder than need be, kind of like how little kids have to go through all kinds of contortions to explain “how Santa delivers all the presents in one night”.
The answer? Like the kiddies, they are trying to explain a myth. The myth is that the government (which actually OWNS EVERYTHING) would ever need to borrow ANYTHING. What’s been missing has been a commonsense definition of “government”:
Government: “one or more persons who claim natural resources, are willing and able to defend their claim on those resources, and make and enforce decisions regarding the allocation of those resources.”
You can only govern property that actually belongs to you. That a government can decide who goes to jail or is held against their will in military service, or must pay part of their wages in taxation, or loses their home to foreclosure, demonstrates that the ACTUAL owner of all of these “natural resources” is the government that can “make and enforce decisions regarding the allocation of those resources.” A government can delegate legal ownership any way it likes (some liked to do it by “market auction”, some by “to my banker buddies”, some by “the government will maintain - or, lately, obtain - ownership”), but any government can only delegate legal ownership of property that “in fact” belongs to itself.
So a government wouldn’t (and doesn’t) have to borrow (except possibly as needed for foreign exchange, an area that I won’t go into here), and yet the borrowing continues at greater and greater levels. What’s happening is that the ACTUAL owners of any government are the owners of ITS MONEY, in our case, that would be the private bankers who own the Federal Reserve System. The USA: Of the Bankers, By the Bankers, For the Bankers.
Before the enactment of the Currency Act of 1764 (which has been described as a principle cause of the revolution), the American colonies were able to create their own paper money by issuing “scrip”. After the Revolution, America was a monetary no-man’s-land, and so THE BANKING INDUSTRY (that had just finished putting down the 2nd American Revolution, more commonly known as “Shays Rebellion”) PACKED the Philadelphia Convention that was creating THEIR new constitution and made sure that state “scrip” was outlawed and a monopoly on the creation of money given to the federal government (where the bankers were pretty sure they could get their hands on it). After a few tries (with some success and some failure), in 1913, that’s exactly what they did.
When you are the owner of a government (as certain bankers currently are of the U.S. Federal Government) you make sure that that government, first and foremost, takes care of your needs, and obviously that has been the case in the current crisis (as it has been for many, many years). THAT is why the government borrows: in order to push along a process that puts a good chunk of everyone else’s labor (via the federal income tax) into the pockets of the rich who get PAID (in the form of interest on their U.S. Treasury bills basically for being rich. Quite the racket, and one that was thought up by (you’ll never guess)…….RICH PEOPLE! (as detailed in the book, “The Creature From Jekyll Island”)
A far more fair system would be to tax everyone a flat small percent of their wealth (in other words, on “benefits already received”), and that only to the degree that new money is put into the system (in order to maintain price stability). A system like that would actually give rich people incentive to encourage the government to hold the line on spending rather than get them to think up new and improved ways to get their hands on tax dollars. A one-half percent “infrastructure maintenance fee” on EVERY electronic debit transaction seems not unfair in order to GET RID OF THE IRS and every form of federal income-based taxation.
What’s putting people out of work is the “cybernetics phase” of the Industrial Revolution. Who really cares if companies are off-shoring mind-numbing call-desk jobs that would only pay $7.40 an hour if they were still here (not to mention that those jobs are all going to be automated themselves with a few years of this just-getting-started “Humongous Depression”)?
What we need to do (in order to end this Humongous Depression) is to take ownership of the government and get it to start taking care of OUR needs, first and foremost. The first thing to do is to replace the Federal Reserve money with OUR OWN money and pay “ourselves” that is, every legal U.S. resident) $1000 per month a piece compensation for the government’s impairment of our right to free access to land, a right whose denial has resulted in many years of wage slavery for millions of people, and, without which, any so-called “right to life” is meaningless. That flat-out takes care of the majority of need for any social security programs, and we should also end all corporate welfare and farm subsidies also: there will be enough money floating around that no such welfare programs will be needed. So it gets us plenty of jobs and no more homeless vets, and way less crime and people here illegally start going home to get the same treatment at home from their governments (because every other country will have to come up with the same deal or face revolution), only we want them to stay because they will work cheaper than impairment-compensated legal residents thereafter will (so we’ll have to do something about that). And so on.
(The National debt will get paid off during the process of replacing the Fed money with our new money, details will need to be worked out, but the debt is the least of our problems and anyway should be considered “odious debt” - and actually owed by the previous owners of the government, so, not to worry.)
A lot of people seem to have a problem with this plan (”Oh, you can’t do THAT!”, which I believe is the same thing they said to Alexander the Great when he outlined his “Gordian Knot” solution) just like children at first can’t begin to comprehend how their parents could actually be putting all those presents under the Christmas tree (not to mention the YEARS of bald-faced lies), but, as THE MAN said, “Time makes more Converts than Reason.” (”THE MAN” being Tom Paine, of course.)
What it will come down to is “no other alternative will have been found to work or even help very much”…you’ll see. The only real alternative will be a “New Dark Ages” for a Balkanized world where everyone is constantly fighting over every square foot of land and sea (as they are currently doing up in Maine, begging the government to exercise ownership and delegate property).
A government that WE owned and that kept its nose out of our butts actually might not be that bad.
You’ll see.
alan jacquemotte (you can read more on my http://www.classmates.com profile page)
ps. about the current healthcare hoo-ha, insurance is the root of all bad service. Better we should increase healthcare supply by training our kids to save lives rather than go overseas and commit war crimes (just the act of invading a country that hasn’t attacked you first is a war crime - per the Kellogg-Briand Pact - so anything actually done in a country that hadn’t attack your country first - like blowing up people - would obviously also be criminal).
Once this plan gets implemented world-wide, it will be pretty unlikely many people will try to “rock the boat” again, or get much audience if they do, so, instead of a U.S. Military force, we just might want to have a “U.S. Medical Force”. Cuba has 4 times as many healthcare professionals per capita as we do and medical care down there is dirt cheap (which is why the AMA keeps a clamp on medical education in the U.S.).
This article gives us a wonderful solution to the problems we face in America today. Please send this article to Alex Jones at Infowars or Prison Planet. Plenty of subscribers are actively searching for an answer to our dilemma. Your idea’s are a positive aproach to replace the Totalitarian government we now have. The genocide (possibly via swine flu vac.) they are planning for us, the destruction of our economy, etc. has to be stopped. Thank you for your time and effort!