Doubling American Public Debt == EVERYONE OWES 2X PUBLIC DEBT SUNDAY
As expected, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into receivership, which means that shares in those companies, which had actually still been trading (even after the close Friday) at several dollars per share, are now worthless. Why anyone other than short sellers buying to close out their positions in these dead companies was actually buying them is beyond comprehension. Well, maybe they're not dead, but they're in comas and on life support and maybe, just maybe, they will eventually revive if they can be kept alive long enough.
Now, it appears that this conservatorship by the government has doubled the public debt. Yes, every man, woman and child in the USA now owes twice as much money as they did on Friday.
This is yet another milestone on the way to the collapse of America. There are two alternatives ahead:
bankruptcy;
inflation.
Either alternative is ultimately inflationary even if bankruptcy is initially deflationary as so many are forecasting.
One of the interesting questions to be resolved will be whether or not banks which hold shares in these two companies will go under due to this action. It's likely that it won't help them.
Signposts on the Road to the Ultimate Fall of America
Police are being directed to not only arrest peaceful political protesters in the former Land of the Free, journalists are also being arrested (note: links to these government websites were valid when this was prepared, but may be removed by censors at any time). Pre-emptive raids on political dissidents is something you would have seen in the USSR before the fall of that state. Now it's happening in the plutocracy of America as well.
The Real Unemployment Rate
While an unemployment rate of 6.1% (the headline rate announced by the Labor Department Friday morning) would have been considered "full employment" during the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s, that same rate now elicits fear and loathing. Of course, that's actually because the plutocrats who run the country have redefined "unemployment." According to the prior definition of unemployment the real rate is 10.7%, up from 10.4% a month ago. That's a typical recessionary level of unemployment.
Although the powers-that-be are loathe to use the word "recession" (it seems to now have the connotation once reserved for "depression"), there's not a doubt that the current recession continues to throw workers out of jobs at an increasing rate. On a broader scale, economic indicators make it clear that the economy isn't turning up after a year spent declining. The official agency which will make the announcement that we have been in a recession is the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research), whose head is Martin Feldstein. Interviewed on CNBC-TV Friday morning, he said that the country was dealing with "recessionary conditions." That's about as close as you can go without outright declaring it a recession.
The lame duck bush in the White House has washed his hands of the mess, declaring that the stimulus checks were "doing their job" and no more stimulus is needed for the economy. Of course, he's leaving the country in such a sad state that the next President will have a very believable scapegoat to blame for the country's problems.
At the very heart of the problem, though, the bankers, more than responsible for creating the imploding credit bubble, sit with their hands out, waiting for taxpayers to bail them out. The storm washes over them like water off a duck's back. They are the real root of the problems we're having, of course. In 1900, the US Dollar was worth twenty times what it was in 2000. A hundred years of banking created a society where most citizens live from paycheck to paycheck. Sure, there are modern conveniences that weren't available then, but the quality of life was on a long term decline throughout the last century---and it's accelerating downward now. Bankers are leeches on the country. They own the money machines, having been delegated the Constitutional power to print money by Congress almost a hundred years ago. With the power to create money out of thin air for their own profit, they have created an increasing concentration of wealth within a diminishing group of super-rich who now own and run America as a single-party, two-headed plutocracy. America is on its last legs. Once the citizens of this once-great country wake up and realize the bankers have stolen it from them, the banker class will soon thereafter become an extinct species. Thomas Jefferson said it best:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks], will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
And this particular Jefferson quote is particularly apropos considering the bailout of government-sponsored hedge funds Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this weekend:
"I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
Clearly, the American public has failed in this regard---and is going to be paying a high cost for that failure.
But, of course, you'll never hear Obama or McCain talking about this subject or calling for real change. That's because both of them are just carefully-selected puppets of the plutocrats. |
