RGV Republican Liberty Club

It’s official. The Almighty One has officially flushed the Republic down the drain. He successfully bought enough votes from Congress to pass Obamacare with enough of a margin to not “single out” any one particular Democrat. Never mind that the Leprechaun changed his vote to Aye after a flight of Airforce One. Never mind that the Stupak coalition had been holding out due to abortion language. Never mind that the general population had soundly notified the Monsters in the Swamp that this socialistic amalgamation of quasi taxes was not only undesirable, but unwanted and despised. That talking heads in DC didn’t follow the wishes of their constituents however. Instead, they turned on them. We’re that much closer to the collapse of the Republic thanks to the abomination that was passed yesterday, led by the likes of Nancy Pelosi.

If Uncle Sam were a genuine human instead of an amalgamated cartoonified concept, he would be aching in pain right now, reaching around in his back pocket seeking a missing billfold or wallet, because not only does he not have the money to pay for this monstrosity, his entire wallet has been stolen away from him, now residing in the hands of the Central Banks of the World. Is it a surprise that the same people who don’t pay their taxes are the kind of people that are hired to run the economy? Is it a surprise that our country, which is functionally bankrupt, is in such a ridiculously high debt, that our grandchildren will inherit it because there is no way for us to pay it off ourselves? Never mind the unfunded liabilities which are OFF the books. Those that are ON the books are bad enough! When Congress votes to raise the debt ceiling by 1.9 TRILLION dollars with the expectation of voting to raise it yet again the next Legislative Session by over 2 TRILLION, where can we possibly go from there? We are currently officially in debt some 12.6 TRILLION dollars. This latest failure from the District is ostensibly going to cost some 900 BILLION dollars. As was seen with TARP 2.0, the costs tripled. It is very likely to triple with this legislation as well. Hopefully we can be only so lucky to keep it reigned in that low without an even higher multiplier. I find it disgusting that my own government has incurred a debt approximating $40,000 dollars per citizen. Yes, that’s right. You, me, your friends, family, and strangers, have all incurred a debt of approximately $40,000 each because your so-called Representatives have committed themselves to a disastrous course. Much like the Titanic being an “unsinkable” ship that totally disproved it’s motto, the U.S.ofA is now officially headed on a sinking course. Your Legislators have failed you. Where every single Republican in the House voted against this bill with 45 Democrats joined them, a simple majority still passed it with a vote of 219-212. This includes our very own Valley “Representatives”, Congressmen Cuellar, Ortiz, & Hinojosa.

Make sure to let your “Representatives” know your thoughts regarding their stab-you-in-the-back vote for Obamacare.

from Flopping Aces:

So much for the phony “spending freeze!”

On the White House web site, the Obama Administration announced their new budget proposal with the banner headline: “A new era of responsibility, the 2011 budget.”

It may be a “new era” but it’s hardly responsible. After complaining in his State of the Union address about the budget mess he inherited, Obama’s big government spending spree will create record deficits for years to come.

The recklessness of this blatant fiscal irresponsibility is staggering. From the Politico:

After a record $1.4 trillion shortfall in 2009, the administration now says the red ink will reach $1.56 trillion this year and be little better, $1.27 trillion in 2011…The outlook….adds up to $5.08 trillion in red ink over the next five years. That’s $1.32 trillion or 35% more than the White House predicted 12 months ago.

With Democrats in control of Congress and the White House spending is spiraling out of control. Obama’s proposed “spending freeze” even if it were implemented would do nothing to stem the red tide.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the $787 billion stimulus bill passed last February will cost $75 billion more than expected. Is anyone surprised?

Even today, Obama continues to try and blame the massive deficits on President Bush, completely overlooking the fact that Democrats have controlled both houses of congress since 2007 and deficits have skyrocketed even higher since he became President.

Democrats may talk and talk about fiscal responsibility but it carries no more weight than the countless empty promises they have made in the past.

Reuters reports:

The U.S. economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, according to research released on Tuesday.

Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.

Did Reuters just say what I think they said? Let’s examine that sentence closer shall we…

Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007

WHOA! Now let’s see here, we are currently in Q1 of 2010 and Reuters just said that the Recession started in Q4 of 2007. Ok, let’s review what a recession actually is now, ok? Now, the rule of thumb for recessions is that 2 negative economic quarters means you are in recession.  Alternatively, this means negative growth.. we’re talking higher unemployment, businesses closing up, people getting their weekly hours at work cut, etc etc etc. Ok, so going from Q4 2007 to Q1 2010, that means we have had 10 Quarters of Recession!

Economists are not in agreement as to what constitutes a Depression. Some say it is 4 consecutive Quarters of Recession. Some say it is a 10% decline in GDP. Others think it is a boundary shift of import/export ratios leading to a contracting ratio. So, we can’t really categorically state that we are currently in a Depression, but it sure feels pretty darn bad!

The “disconnection rate” — Americans aged 20 to 24 who were neither in school nor working — jumped to 28 percent last year from 17 percent in 2007.

Wow, over a two year period we see an increase of 11% to unemployment in this age bracket. Time are certainly tough for many, and it makes sense for everyone to look at times getting tougher, so seek out economic safe havens.

Even the Gremlins knew what to invest in for prospering in dark times:

From The Washington Post:

Although Democrats think their health-care legislation faces smooth sailing to implementation, there is a rock dead ahead — a constitutional challenge to the legislation’s core. Democrats who assume it is constitutional to make it mandatory for Americans to purchase health insurance should answer some questions:

Would it be constitutional for the government to legislate compulsory calisthenics for all Americans? If not, why not? If it would be, in what sense does the nation still have constitutional, meaning limited, government?

Yes indeed… there is definitely a Constitutional challenge looming beyond the passage of this abysmal legislation. The issue of forcing a citizen to purchase health insurance alone is flatly and easily discerned as unconstitutional. It’s nothing short of Government mandated theft. The desire of the individual to not pay for it is their own. Being told that you MUST pay for it or go to jail for up to 5 years is preposterous! Yet Speaker Pelosi glosses over this issue as if it is fair. Appropriate?!? In what world is it appropriate to jail a citizen for refusing to purchase said plan? As a matter of fact, let’s see her dance around this issue…

Wow. She certainly has the gift for gab doesn’t she? The ability to dance around this issue and not be called out on it by every single journalist in that room is atrocious.

Ah, but back to the Washington Post, and perhaps the most important point that Mr. Will makes.

Judicial review — let us be candid: judicial supervision of democracy — troubles people who believe, mistakenly, that the Constitution’s primary purpose is simply to provide the institutional architecture for democracy. Such people believe that having government by popular sovereignty is generally much more important than what government does; hence, courts should be broadly deferential to preferences expressed democratically. This is the doctrine of those conservatives who deplore, often with more vigor than precision, “judicial activism.”

More truly conservative conservatives take their bearings from the proposition that government’s primary purpose is not to organize the fulfillment of majority preferences but to protect preexisting rights of the individual — basically, liberty. These conservatives favor judicial activism understood as unflinching performance of the courts’ role in that protection.

That role includes disapproving congressional encroachments on liberty that are not exercises of enumerated powers. This obligatory engagement with the Constitution’s text and logic supersedes any obligation to be deferential toward the actions of government merely because they reflect popular sovereignty.

The latter kind of conservatives are more truly conservative than the former kind because they have stronger principles for resisting the conscription of individuals, at a cost of diminished liberty, into government’s collective projects. So a constitutional challenge to the mandate serves two purposes: It defies a pernicious idea and clarifies conservatism.

Well, here is the key point of the article. The understanding that the role of the Government is to protect our liberties. Courts should not be advocating changes to the legal system and using procedural wrangling to enact such change. It is their role to preside of the rule of law as it exists, thereby protecting the individual from loss of liberties.

So, the elite bankers are loading up on weapons, in anticipation of we the people coming for them with our pitchforks and torches. The story here seems unsurprising that these people, famously known for their greed, would be making yet more preparations for the future based on their past history of successful clairvoyance.

Bloomberg reports that though it might be difficult for an average citizen in the Northeast to acquire a concealed handgun permit, it is not preventing the Bankers from loading up on various types of firearms, concealable or not.

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

so, is it true or is it just idle speculation on the part of gossipers and angry customers of the bank?

The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

Well now. At least that’s some info that is useful, even if the NYPD has chosen to sit on it’s collective butt and not release pertinent information. But what exactly is a “preliminary matter” anyway? I don’t really know, but I’m sure it has something to do with their covering themselves. But is this just social angst regarding the bailout of the banks? After all, the illegitimacy of the monies ‘lent’ to them is an excellent topic of conversation.

Perhaps it is more of a reaction to the failure of the system itself. If indeed the system were sound and able to cope with large quantities of so-called ‘toxic debts’ then would this even have been an issue? People have finally taken notice of the failure of the system and begun to question the system itself:

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

This, indeed, is what the Bankers fear the most. They profit off the sweat of our brows and are content to sit back, perpetually wringing more and more blood money from the stone that is the American people. Ivory towers are unnecessary. They get to sit back in luxurious penthouse suites counting the interest payments that mean free money to them because We The People are not doing anything to fix the broken system. Now, however, when we begin to question the validity of the system, they panic. They realise that something drastic must be done before we take stock of how much damage they have really done to us.

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

So, if they have all the money to buy guns and safe rooms for their mansions, what do I have left to buy? A rusty pitchfork?

No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.

And if the proles really do appear brandishing pitchforks at the doors of Park Avenue and the gates of Round Hill Road, you can be sure that the Goldman guys and their families will be holed up in their safe rooms with their firearms. If nothing else, that pistol permit might go part way toward explaining why they won’t be standing outside with the rest of the crowd, broke and humiliated, saying, “Damn, I was on the wrong side of a trade with Goldman again.”

My congratulations to the creators of South Park for winning a 2009 Emmy Award.  The episode “Margaritaville” won the 2009 Emmy Award for “Outstanding Animated Program Less Than One Hour.” 

The episode dealt with the Stan trying to get a return for his money of a Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville, while portraying the guys at the Treasury Department as idiots who rely on the wheel of fortune and chickens in dealing with the econimic mess they have a hand on. 

 While the economics might be cartoonish (of course, it’s a cartoon), it leaves a great impression of truth that in reality, government beaurocrats have no idea how their mix and match regulations can mess up the market… sometimes taking us all along for the ride.

from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125166593642570507.html and http://www.themonitor.com/news/talks-30108-calif-lenders.html

newspaper

I would assert that this indeed the true cause of the decline of the newspaper industry. The Internets have provided a medium for people to find the information they hunger for. Has there been a hurricane off the coast of Florida where you have relatives living? Check their website and email and IM and facebook and myspace and whatever other method of contact you have. You no longer have to wait for the local news affiliate to writeup an article for the Associated Press and send it out on the newswire for 1100 newspapers to pick up and reprint, not having their own journalist on site…

The means by which people consume their information has changed for the most part. It has changed permanently. No longer is one forced to read an Op Ed piece from the local Editor extolling the virtues of Obamacare or why the Red states are not worth listening too. No longer does one have to consume the shallow drivel printed by reporters who don’t take much time to fact-check or research their articles much before printing them. No longer does one have to subject himself to the studied bias presented by his local Rag. Now, options abound. I can subscribe to any newspaper feed in these United States, or the world at large, for that matter. I can get a digital feed with daily or weekly digest format reports in my inbox. If I don’t like the reporting style of my local rag, I can pull up the Dallas Morning News, or the Houston Chronicle, or the Austin American-Statesman. I’m not limited to the information that the Editor of my local rag thinks I should be privy to.

Even better, I have tools available, like RSS feeds which gather headlines for me from any number of sources with which I select to collect news on any hot topics of interest or keywords I want. I’m not relegated to consuming the drivel of my local Editor’s choice. I can see and consume IMPORTANT information; information which is relevant to my life, job, security, freedom, and desires. News aggregation websites have even sprung up which provide this service for free. Google news (http://news.google.com) and Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/) are excellent examples. Browsing through their collated pages of topics, I can have my choice of reading 1400 articles on the recent wildfires in California which have consumed over 85,000 acres of forest land. If I don’t trust a few of those papers because of their ideological viewpoints or the style of printing, I have 1399 other choices available to me.

This is the problem that the newspapers are faced with. They have gotten so deep into the concept of controlling what news you and I should be reading, that they have forgotten (or intentionally mislaid) their journalistic integrity. Freedom Communications, Inc. was founded in the 30s by R. C. Hoiles to spread his Libertarian views in print. Since then, that viewpoint has significantly degenerated across it’s ownings. Perhaps a return to the traditional values of the organization will return it to its former success.

Perhaps the increasing cost of the daily paper while it simultaneously decreases in size will be it’s true death knell.

Perhaps people will just reject it entirely, instead seeking out their own information on their own terms.

Webster Tarpley is a well known and respected author. This article eloquently paints the picture with a historic backdrop of what is happening right now in America and how it could quite easily lead to a scenario of hyperinflation akin to that experienced by the Weimar Republic. If you are unfamiliar with the Weimar Republic, no doubt you are familiar with the infamous photos of people with wheelbarrows of cash walking down to their local grocers in order to buy small amounts of food. Read the entire article to understand the issue and find out more about Tarpley’s works at http://www.tarpley.net/

from http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/153948922/the-second-wave-of-the-depression-hyperinflation

The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ….” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 – 1923.

During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency — and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff — strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.

The rumors of a bank holiday in the near future seem to abound on the internet these days. I won’t belabor that particular issue, but I find it highly interesting that more and more people in the precious metals industry are coming out and claiming that the prices have been artificially kept low. Couple this with the increasingly large amount of money that the Fed has been printing out of thin air without anything backing it up other than the “full faith and credit” of these USofA and you have a disastrous situation waiting to coalesce into the massive amount of pain it is portrayed to become. Let’s think on the recent history of gold. If you had purchased a few ounces merely 5 years ago, you would have paid $390 per ounce (plus associated costs). Currently, spot price is $961. That’s a 146% increase in value. That’s nearly 2.5 times the value of your initial investment! I find it interesting that there are so many people now who are interested in purchasing gold and/or silver and from many accounts, it is difficult to come by. Many local dealers are out of inventory, including my very own local dealer that only gets short shipments infrequently and of unspecified quantities and qualities of gold.

As for silver, well, the situation there seems slightly better. Historically, silver and gold have had a correlating ratio of about 12 or 13 to 1. Basically, whatever the price for gold, you could buy about 12 or 13 times that equivalent in silver. This trend ended relatively recently. Why is that? Again, I would suggest that it is due to the artificial manipulation of the precious metals marketplace to suppress the value of the metals in question. I would assert that there is a great amount of growth left yet in the market for these two metals, despite their current pricing. Argument for tat is best served another day, and by persons more entrenched in PMs than myself. For now, read up on this article to get a shorthand account of why the Fed is linked yet again in another part of our economic system and has caused irreparable harm.

from http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=469&fl=

Chapman: We had a classical gold standard for 200 years that provided a good deal more monetary stability than the current system. There were problems with it, but the problems had little to do with the creation of money itself. Today we have a money problem and it is very obvious where the responsibility lies. Just go on the Internet and read about it. Then ask yourself, where did this concept of a central bank come from? Is that all there is to it? Of course not. There are plenty of forces, families and extraordinarily wealthy individuals standing in the shadows of the central bank. They didn’t get a lot of exposure in previous decades, but they are certainly exposed now.

All the more reason to support H.R. 1207 aka the Audit the Fed Bill. The Bill already has a majority of cosponsors on it. It is nearing the amount required for a supermajority to force a vote, despite the wishes of the Speaker. But guess who has NOT signed on as a cosponsor of this important Bill? Our very own Congressman Ruben Hinojosa. It is all the more important that he become a cosponsor on this Bill as he is a member of the House Committee on Financial Services. Hinojosa is on the wrong side of history if he votes against this Bill. Make sure you call his offices today and inform him of this.