I just “discovered” Kris Anne Hall & Liberty First. You MUST GO HERE and listen to what this brilliant woman has to say regarding history, liberty and government.
Click to jump to Liberty First Podcast via Radio Free Redoubt / Podbean page
… Despite the Obama administration touting a budget deficit of “only” $680 billion in 2013, the GAO’s more accurate accounting shows a total government cost of $3.8 trillion on total revenue of $2.8 trillion.
In other words– the administration wasn’t exactly honest with the American people– the deficit was more like $1 trillion, not $680 billion.
But it gets worse.
The GAO added up ALL the US government’s assets in 2013. Aircraft carriers. The highway system. Land. Cash and financial assets. The total is $2.97 trillion. The liabilities, on the other hand, total $19.88 trillion. This includes the official public debt, plus all sorts of IOUs and loan guarantees.
This means the net EQUITY of the US government is -$16.9 trillion [poster note: yes negative folks. GE.]
Moreover, the US government’s cash position is a mere $206 billion… roughly 1.1% of its public debt. This isn’t enough to cover net interest payments for the next year.
Unlike a savvy investor who borrows cheap money to purchase productive assets, the US government borrows money to pay interest.
via Sovereign Man and H/T to ZeroHedge where we saw it first
In the broadest sense, there are three types of systems in the world.
The first are simple systems which are characterized by only a few variables or agents, and which can be described by perhaps a handful of equations (or even one).
The second are systems which are characterized by disorganized complexity. These may consist of huge numbers of agents or variables, and their interactions cannot be described by simple equations; yet the overall system is well-described statistically through averages and can be described as being stochastic. Such systems are typically characterized by a stable equilibrium, provided there are no external shocks to the system. They are incapable of generating internal shocks or surprises. For example, you might consider the distribution of air molecules in a room. You may not be able to predict the motion of any particular air molecule, but you can be reasonable certain that the global population won’t do anything unexpected (like all move into one side of the room leaving a vacuum on the other side). Continue reading →
The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis. Continue reading →
A business enterprise is solvent when its operations are supported by its after-tax cash flow. Should cash flow be temporarily insufficient, borrowing against accounts receivable is the classic remedy. With serial borrowing however, operations-plus-debt-service eventually becomes unsupportable by cash flow, real or anticipated. Creditors withdraw when they see this, it’s insolvency or near enough. The business closes, its assets are liquidated and the proceeds distributed among its creditors. This is what’s happening to the US, aside from the liquidation part. Debt repudiation by inflation—watering down the currency—holds such comeuppance at bay, at least for a while. Continue reading →
Project censored: The expanding police state tops the annual list of stories under-reported by the mainstream media, By Yael Chanoff – Thursday, October 11,2012
People who get their information exclusively from mainstream media sources may be surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on the left for President Barack Obama in this crucial election. But that’s probably because they weren’t exposed to the full online furor sparked by Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s overreaching approach to national security, such as signing the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the indefinite detention of those accused of supporting terrorism, even U.S. citizens.
We’ll never know how this year’s election would be different if the corporate media adequately covered the NDAA’s indefinite detention clause and many other recent attacks on civil liberties. What we can do is spread the word and support independent media sources that do cover these stories. That’s where Project Censored comes in. Continue reading →
Ann Banhardt on The Hagmann & Hagmann Report, Sept 24, 2012.
Wobbly audio quality in parts of first half, but worth the perseverance.
I love Ann, I do, but she tends to the dramatic in her presentation. The facts she lays out are, however, stark and I fear on the money. Go here for Ann’s site and her youtube channel
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in 2011, the Federal Reserve purchased a mind-blowing 61% of Treasury debt issuance… When the U.S. needs money to fund its ever-expanding foreign interests, social welfare programs, or its war against dried flowers, it can obtain that money through a few different means. The least effective and most politically dangerous way for it to obtain money is to threaten American citizens with imprisonment if they don’t fork over their dough. Historically, Americans have refused to hand over anything greater than 20% of GDP through taxes regardless of tax rates or the threats the state makes against their person.
Since the state has trouble getting Americans to hand over their money, it generally turns to the much easier second option to finance itself: printing money. In today’s economy, the state prints money by issuing treasury debt. Normally it sells this debt to foreign nations, since this exports the inflation created by the issuance of new debt. However, there are natural limits to the amount of debt foreign nations are willing to hold.
Government lies are legion.So many are its lies, that narrowing them down to three of the most important is a demanding task. But our current crisis has been chiefly enabled by monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the global military empire. So I have chosen to focus on lies about each: the Federal Reserve, the orchestrator of monetary policy; the U.S. budget, the accounting of government fiscal policy; and a few of the Empire’s war lies. I am sharing just a smattering of this astonishing record of duplicity in these areas, for life is short, or at least far too short to recount all of the state’s lies about each.
Lie #1: The Federal Reserve Is a Bank… A bank is a company in the free economy that competes with other banks offering willing customers a safe place to make deposits and earn an interest rate return, while also competing to offer loans from those deposits to willing borrowers…
Lie #2: War Lies … In the case of the Iraq war, not only did defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lie about knowing where the non-existent weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq (“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”), in a later exchange with my friend former CIA senior analyst Ray McGovern, Rumsfeld even denied he had made such a claim..
Lie #3: The Real U.S. Debt …This may be the most brazen and transparent lie of all, the one about the U.S. national debt, now over $15 trillion dollars. It is a number that hides the severity of our situation… the real federal debt is much, much larger and like an iceberg below the water line, most of it is hidden out of sight… Each year the federal government makes new promises and takes on trillions in new financial obligations that do not show up in the visible, official national debt. The persistent growth of these hidden debts each year far outpaces the increases in the visible debt. In 2010 for example, the visible federal debt grew by an astonishing $1.5 trillion. But the hidden debt – out of sight and without debate – grew by more than $5 trillion!… go here to LewRockwell.com
Each generation hopes their children and grandchildren will achieve more economic potential and more individual freedom than prior generations. As a new grandfather I researched economic conditions and education quality facing the generation of my infant grandchildren and their parents, compared to that faced by my generation when their age. The results are available to you in a series of free mini-reports listed on thehome page – with explanatory pictures.
There are so many great & positive things about our beloved America to celebrate. But, there are also some negative trends. Perhaps if more are aware of the negatives even more solutions & positives will result. The objective of these reports is to increase awareness of certain disturbing items, using an easy-to-understand format with hard data presented in picture form.
It remains unclear exactly why or how the Gadhafi regime went from “a model” and an “important ally” to the next target for regime change in a period of just a few years. But after claims of “genocide” as the justification for NATO intervention were disputed by experts, several other theories have been floated.
Oil, of course, has been mentioned frequently — Libya is Africa‘s largest oil producer. But one possible reason in particular for Gadhafi’s fall from grace has gained significant traction among analysts and segments of the non-Western media: central banking and the global monetary system.
According to more than a few observers, Gadhafi’s plan to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. dollars — demanding payment instead in gold-backed “dinars” (a single African currency made from gold) — was the real cause. The regime, sitting on massive amounts of gold, estimated at close to 150 tons, was also pushing other African and Middle Eastern governments to follow suit. And it literally had the potential to bring down the dollar…
In the broadest sense, there are three types of systems in the world.
People who get their information exclusively from mainstream media sources may be surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on the left for President Barack Obama in this crucial election. But that’s probably because they weren’t exposed to the full online furor sparked by Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s overreaching approach to national security, such as signing the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the indefinite detention of those accused of supporting terrorism, even U.S. citizens.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in 2011, the Federal Reserve purchased a mind-blowing 61% of Treasury debt issuance… When the U.S. needs money to fund its ever-expanding foreign interests, social welfare programs, or its war against dried flowers, it can obtain that money through a few different means. The least effective and most politically dangerous way for it to obtain money is to threaten American citizens with imprisonment if they don’t fork over their dough. Historically, Americans have refused to hand over anything greater than 20% of GDP through taxes regardless of tax rates or the threats the state makes against their person.
The Grey Enigma 