Taxpayer Clearing House.

*wipes tear away.

Sirs, i salute you.

Think Green Limousine -- Update

According to Reuters, they declined my sugestion of Hipocraton, and instead have dubbed the series of luxurious security vehicles "The Beast" at least one of which can now be seen daily in presidential service. (well, when he isnt taking the old family SUV which was still seen in service as recently as Feb, 28)

Id make some comments about the Book of Revelations here, but id just be labeled as some religious conservative nutjob, and besides, im really just waiting to see if it actually gets its power from a dragon, and can talk.  

My, we do live in some interesting times, dont we?

All in all, not a bad name for an earth-eater, and im sure GM appreciates the business, I hear The state of Maryland recently paid $5.26 million for almost 15 acres of additional car storage space near this bridge, painted with a General Motors logo, near the Dundalk Marine Terminal at the port of Baltimore, to make more room for the 57,000 unsold new cars now parked there as GM lobbies the Canadian Govt for a $6,000,000,000.00 handout, and various European Govts for a measly $4,200,000,000.00 in "Operating Aid"

Meanwhile, somewhat closer to detroit:

Force Multipliers coming between Us and Them

When it comes to the age age old question of "Cant we all just get along?" something always seems to get in the way, often our prejudices or ignorance, sometimes it is the avarice of evil men, or the duplicitous natures of nationalism, egalitarianism and democratization, whatever it is, somewhere, there is created in the minds of men an artificial construct called "Us and Them."

Here it is again:

(Click for full view)

From a here unnamed public forum comes this screenshot, which i think speaks for itself. (H/T to David Codrea for the image)

If you you wonder about the context, this was in response to this video, which i wont comment on here, but to say:

We have fallen a long way.



Some people seem to wish to drag us further into a land that is ruled by men, such as our friends above, men with hyperactive linguas and dormant cerebrums filled with boiled cereals and less than latent fantasies of violence, rather than a respectful world that is ruled by (honorable) law and natural rights.

Of course we must not let them, and if need be, we must destroy them, before they destroy us.

And that, my friends, is how we got "The Us," and "The Them," yesterday, today, and into the future.

God save us all from ourselves.

The Definition of "Working Hard" in Government

From New York Times:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in greeting Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, presented him with a red plastic button emblazoned with the English word “reset” and the Russian word “peregruzka.”

The gift was a play on Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call in Munich last month for the two countries to “press the reset button” on their relationship.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Mrs. Clinton said, handing the button to Mr. Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?”

“You got it wrong,” he replied, explaining that the Americans had come up with the Russian word for overcharged.

“We won’t let you do that to us,” she said quickly, with a full-throated laugh

Jebus, and just think, these are the people in charge of our Diplomatic Relations with the second largest Nuclear arsenal on Earth, in the greatest period of global instability the world has seen since WWII.

As for "Working hard", thirty five seconds on google translate got me this:

And i dont have an $11,455,559,000.00 a year budget with which to, i dont know, hire one of the nearly 500,000 Russian Immigrants admitted to the United States legally since 1970. 

Proving once again, that what the federal government spends Billions to do, could be done better by a 12year old with a laptop.

Now, im not exactly fluent in Russian myself, but i do know that Delo mastera boitsya. (work is afraid of a skilled worker) 

Well, fear not, job at hand, these are the ones we put in charge. 

Thats What We Need: More Debt.

(Portrait of what some bankers hope is the American Dream)

The shortsighted and inherently self serving government cartels this week launched a program to spur lending for autos, education, credit cards and other nonsensical consumer loans by providing up to $200 billion in financing to investors for the purpose of extending and expanding the withering credit markets.

The program, dubbed the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, (TABS) was created by the Fed in conjunction with The Treasury Department. First announced last year, and existing separately from the huge "stimulus and bailout" packages passed in recent months by congress, (which incur huge amounts of Public Debt) the program has the potential to generate up to $1 trillion of lending for businesses and households (to encourage the accumulation of Private Debt) (if you have trouble understanding how a 200 billion dollar loan can equal 1 trillion dollars in lending liquidity, please watch Money as Debt, and you will quickly see that that is only the beginning, and that the actual amount will be much greater as those initial loans are deposited in other financial institutions)

Participants, consisting of companies and investors who will pledge eligible collateral to back the loan, most likely consisting of poorly rated securities that would otherwise be unviable in the free market, must request the new government loans by March 17. The Fed will then provide three-year loans on March 25.

While most of the financial witches den is a-twitter at the prospect of new funny money with which to expand credit and eventually (with interest) their own pocketbooks (at the cost of personal and business indebitude), some analysts fear that the program will be detrimental even for the financial industry's fleecing goals. Anil Kashyap, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, in a recent Breitbart Report, said "the program should make it easier for consumers to get loans, but cautioned that the Fed's involvement in this area could have unintended consequences elsewhere by making other debt securities not backed by the government less attractive to investors."

"We'd really rather the credit markets just work properly," Kashyap said.

Some more enlightened fellow replied that the credit markets haven't worked correctly in some number of years, and that he just wished the madness would end, and people would start taking some personal responsibility for their own expenses. "Working properly" would be working in a world where the amount of materials, plus the amount of labor going into a given good, would come near to equaling the value of the good, something that cannot exist in unsustainable and inherently unstable debt based consumption economy.

The Fed plans to keep the program running through December, but said it could be extended, which i have no doubt it will, along with many other programs and schemes The Fed has started or become involved with since aug 2007.

Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6 2008 after rising by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA (and therefore werent worth accepting as any real value.)

Fed lending as of Feb. 25 was $1.92 billion.

On Feb. 23, the Fed disclosed a breakdown by broad categories for $1.81 trillion of collateral pledged by banks and bond dealers (as of Dec. 17) after Congress demanded more transparency from the secretive banking cartel, which had been entrusted to oversee and dole out the last two Bailout measures approved by congress, (AIG and TARP) and then refused to disclose even the names of the people or entities receiving the congressional funds.

The largest portions of collateral being held by the Fed at that time were $456 billion in commercial loans, $203 billion in consumer loans and $159 billion in residential mortgages, according to the central bank’s Web site. It didn’t identify any loans or provide their credit ratings and said it will update the figures about every two months, hardly the transparency or accountability the congress asked for.

Government loans, spending or guarantees to rescue the country’s financial system total more than $11.7 trillion since the international war on non cartel ownership began in August 2007.

Much talk has been made, as of late, concerning the fraud that seems to have riddled the financial markets, and perhaps underpinned the current financial crisis, from the infamous Madhoff Scandal to allegations of corruption at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. While it is true that fraud does exist (on more levels than most care to admit) it is hardly the root of the problem today. (Nor is it the justification for the Mother of all Bailouts)

The people involved willfully misrepresented the facts for monetary gain, and are therefore guilty of fraud, but no one seems to be asking, "Did they have any choice?"

To have been honest in such a financial market would have been to commit financial suicide.

The fact is that the federal reserve system itself is inherently fraudulent, and provided, (in the form of Greenspan's infamous 1% interest rate, et al) the various incentives to commit that fraud, designed to balloon the economy back to life through increasingly thinly stretched derivatives of derivatives, to pay off an unsustainable and inherently unstable debt based consumption economy.

As i commented a few weeks ago on a story posted by WRS on financial fraud:

Its fine to point out that its just a shell game, and that these assets
were leveraged so far that they were essentially worthless, but you must
realize that you aren't the only one that could see that, including the
bankers that were buying those leveraged assets. The fact is, those assets
would not have sold on an open or deregulated market. The only reason they were
sold and resold (to such moral peril!) was that the incentive to do so was
dutifully provided by the Federal Reserve/Federal Regulatory Agencies with the
additional, bankable, implied backing of the full faith and value of the
American government.

The same thing has been done for years by the foreign branch of the Fed,
the IMF, and when those loans cant be paid back, (they weren't viable) what do
they do? they go to congress, and ask Americans to pay them off. Whats the
difference here?

That's where the value came from, and why those banks kept selling (and
buying)

American Government Interference, in addition to the inherently fraudulent
way that money is created, in the Federal Reserve System, is what gave those
leveraged assets continued value beyond what the market could honestly bear, and
is the source of ALL of the fraud we are seeing today.

As for Madoff, how is what he did any worse than what Bernake does every
day?

The same story continues here, this week, as The Fed, a secretive and private bankers cartel, uses more authority swindled from the American Legislative to prop up unviable and commercially worthless securities, that would be untradable at these values, with the FULL FAITH of the American People.

And what do the American people get out this arrangement? More crushing debt, grossly inflated prices, lower pay for the same amount of labor, and the sustainment of a doomed bubble that will only worsen the longer it is is prevented from correcting. 

Good Job, im glad The Fed was able to solve that problem.

Its time for the American people to stop believing in The Fed, and start moving into a responsible future where history, and time is owned by those who make it.

Abolish the Fed.

Own Yourselves.

The Evil That Men Do: Willful Submission To Illegitimate Authority

"Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery they may indeed wait for ever."
~ Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)

We live in tumultuous times that demand close attention to the yokes being placed on us. The US government is seemingly in the throes of a coup that is exponentially creeping and expanding into what was formerly a fairly autonomous province. Every sector and branch of human transactions that are palpable in this mortal coil is now being subject to regulation, taxation or both. With no authority whatsoever, entire swaths of American society are being subsumed under Leviathan State...

So writes William Buppert on the subject of compliance to illegitimate authority this week at LewRockwell. Its not a new problem, but one we dont always think of.

Read the rest here

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.*

From John Robb over at Global Guerrillas we have this:

Resilient Communities JOURNAL:

Wall Street Icon Jim Rogers calls for Resilient Communities?

The legendary investor Jim Rogers (via CNBC), known for sniffing out global trends worthy of investment, lets loose: "I think it's astonishing, they're [the big bankrupt banks and their government enablers] ruining the US economy, they're ruining the US government, they're ruining the US central bank and they're ruining the US dollar...

You are watching something in front of our eyes, very historically, which is basically the destruction of New York as a financial center and the destruction of America as the world's most powerful country. The idea that you have too much debt, too much borrowing and too much consumption and you're going to solve that problem with more debt, more consumption and more borrowing?

These people are nuts.

Power is shifting now from the money shifters, the guys who trade paper and money, to people who produce real goods. What you should do is become a farmer, or start a farming network."

Posted by John Robb on Tuesday, 03 March 2009 at 06:06 PM

*- This advice comes from the less contemporary William Blake, i think it still holds value
H/T MVB