Beyond The Broken Spectrum

Mises Daily: Friday, January 29, 2010 by George F. Smith

Having failed to learn what causes depressions and how to treat them when they arrive, our nation’s leaders are steering us straight into a monetary catastrophe. Predictably, the major media voices are clinging to the assurances of Keynesians, who see new wads of debt and paper money and conclude that the good times are ready to roll again; don’t pay any heed to the millions still looking for work.

The free-lunch Keynesians even tell us how we got into the crisis and what saved us. Paul Krugman speaks for many when he blames market deregulation for the meltdown and hails the Fed’s printing press as our savior.

What does this mean? It means we can laugh at rumors that the Fed’s cheap credit brought on the crisis. We can laugh even harder at the claim that Fed monetary pumping will ensure an even greater disaster down the road. And we can save our biggest laughs for that lucky guesser, Peter Schiff, whose knowledgeable detractors laughed at him in 2006 when he predicted the current meltdown. (more…)

Widely believed to be dead, there is now supposedly a new tape released by Bin Laden claiming responsibility for the Christmas day attempt to blow up a plane headed to Michigan.

Research the evidence and find out for yourself, but I am now counting myself in the category of people that believe the CIA and/or other government/special interest entities are  behind these tapes and videos in an effort to sustain our disastrous foreign policy and the “war on terrorism.”  For them, war is good for business, as budgets are inflated and there is plenty of contract money to be had. All of this goes away when a war ends, which is one of the main reasons why it has taken so long for the failed and costly war on drugs to wind down.

Call me what you want, crazy, conspiracy theorist, whatever. However there is little doubt in my mind that the American people are intentionally being lied to so that more and more of our money can be taken from us to benefit the war mongers in Washington and all of their special interest buddies.

The Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a prominent Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids, Fox News has learned.

For nearly $4.5 million a year, the State Department assigned a 16-person security detail to protect six U.S. contractors in Iraq who already had a team of hired guards they didn’t really need.

The expensive miscue is one of many described in an audit issued Monday of a $2.5 billion State Department contract with DynCorp International for training Iraq’s police force.

The department repeatedly failed to oversee the contract properly, according to the audit by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The findings also suggest the department remains ill-equipped to watch over the vast amount of U.S. money flowing into Afghanistan. Read the article at Fox News

The Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling has now declared that corporations and unions have the same rights that people do, and will now be allowed to buy elections till their heart’s content. We need to give George Bush a big thank you for making this possible, as his two picks Roberts and Alito  helped to make up the majority ruling along with Kennedy, Thomas, and Scalia to sell we the people out. Short history lesson, Reagan put Kennedy and Scalia in, and Bush Sr. put Thomas on the court, so they deserve our thanks as well for this gracious gift of fascism.

The ruling now allows corporations and unions to finance their own political machines with unlimited amounts of special interest money to campaign for various candidates that will give them special kickbacks when they get into office, and against candidates that would deny government power to help prop up the special interest groups.

A dark period in history for the United States has now gotten even darker, as all three branches of government “four if you count the media”, has now given their stamp of approval in their blatant aid of fascism and corporatism all in their own ways. It is no longer the people who are deciding who gets into office, “in reality, they still are”, but the special interest groups who basically control the politicians because they have deeper pockets than the average person. This only further proves that more controls are needed to ensure our government has less power to enslave us, by setting term limits for all positions within government, including the Supreme Court.

Our country has been stolen from us with the help of the media, politicians, and the judicial system, all enabled by the voters who put them there. Its a sad truth, but the fact of the matter is that most people have no one to blame but themselves, as they take the easy way out and continue to vote for the status-quo politicians in hope that their vote for “the lesser of 2 evils” will eventually pay off and that by some miracle, the trash candidate that they voted for will actually represent their interest in liberty, which never happens. A quote from Albert Einstein defines this issue well “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Senator-elect Brown comes to mind here, where voters wanted something different, yet still voted for a guy that is prime status-quo material, and his horrid record proves it. There wasn’t much difference between him and Coakley, but one has to wonder how many people even saw this. Then there was Joe Kennedy, a true candidate of good change, who received death threats for his involvement in the race. People actually threatened to kill a man, the only candidate running in support of their liberty, so that another candidate that would suppress their liberties, could win. It is mind boggling that these people talk about achieving some real progress in taking our country back, but then turn around and elect more of the same.

Many people falsely believe that we live in a capitalist society, when the truth couldn’t be further from it. Corporatism and special interests thrive and make their dishonest living off the backs of Americans and people from other countries alike through the coercive power of the government. This is a severe problem, but one that cannot be fixed until another problem is addressed, the voters who put people in power that allow this to happen.

Edit: Please see my recent article concerning a reversal of my decision on this subject. This article may only be republished if it includes a clear reference to my second article.

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product — a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don’t support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies. Article continues at the L.A. Times

I just got a free golf cart.

Actually, it cost me $6,490—but the dealer, Colin Riley of Tucson, Ariz., points out that there’s a $6,490 federal tax credit on such vehicles. Riley runs ads that say: “FREE ELECTRIC CAR … !”

Some consumers probably assume it’s a car-dealer scam, but it’s not. It’s an Uncle Sam scam.

Article at Reason Magazine

A personal letter from your representative. Enjoy!

TIME Magazine has named Ben Bernanke its person of the year.

In their article they herald him as some special hero that saved us from the brink of collapse. It always seems to be the same old song and dance, government entity creates a problem, government entity fixes the problem they created, and then expects us to cheer for them and call for more government since without them, we would have gone under. Never mind that it was because of them that we almost went under with their fast and loose money policies during the good times.

When it came time for the bubble to burst, it was too late to try and fix the problem, the only option was to weather it and keep the rates low and the money pumping. Remember, the federal reserve controls our money supply and interest rates, and provided these companies with the ability to create the bubbles that imploded on the average investor and employee. Without the fed and all of the government intrusion into the markets, this likely wouldn’t have happened, and if it had, it wouldn’t have been of the same magnitude. We suffer when the government becomes a player and not just a referee.

Sure, Bernanke did a decent job of helping to clean up the mess, but the fact remains that the federal reserve and government meddling caused the mess in the first place.

We need transparency and accountability with the central banking cartel that controls our money. The first and foremost important thing we can do to help ourselves is a complete audit of the federal reserve. Once this is done, we will have transparency and can move on to meaningful reform.

Another bill introduced by Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the Free Competition in Currency Act (HR 4248) is another major step in giving back control of the economy to the people.

It all boils down to whether we want to take care of ourselves or let the nanny state take control. I don’t know about you, but I want to take care of my own business.

Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line.

Chevron’s tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador’s government to squelch the case, to producing a pseudo-news report casting the company as the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean political system — were designed to win powerful allies in Congress and the Obama administration as well as to shape public opinion and calm shareholders.

But many of the company’s moves have backfired, drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York’s attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator.

“Their lobbying and PR efforts are really clumsy and very heavy handed, and I think that that’s why they’re experiencing a degree of backlash,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who is circulating the first of what she promises will be three letters to colleagues blasting what she calls the company’s “misguided approach” to dealing with the case.

The case stems from a class action suit brought by well-connected U.S. trial lawyers on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans alleging that from 1964 to 1990, Texaco — which was purchased by Chevron in 2001 — dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest, leaving behind an unprecedented environmental and public health disaster including a wave of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages.

Story at Politico

While Fox News has devoted its attention to organizations that have no business receiving money from the government, it seems they are slacking on the job now.

Featured below is an article from MediaMatters.org, a left leaning organization as you’ll notice from the way the article is written and the comments at the bottom. The original title is “After aggressively promoting ACORN videos, Fox News ignores reports of Blackwater bribes” but as you’ve noticed, I decided to cut the first part of the title out. While many people hated the fact that Fox News for once did its job well in exposing corruption involved with our tax dollars, others were glad to see ACORN defunded, even if it won’t be permanently. People are concerned about government waste and fraud, and rightly so with our record multi-trillion dollar deficits.

This is really the way the media works though. All of the major media outlets are owned by a handful of people, and these people either belong to the Republicans or Democrats. Each party has its own special interests they have to protect and a lot of the protection comes from these media outlets. This is why both sides are hypocrites when they proceed to call out one another for not covering something. This article does have merit though, which is why I’m posting it here. I just want everyone to be aware that left or right, they’re in it for themselves and the people with money and power, they could care less about the average person. So read on with an open mind, and don’t fall into the back and forth that they want you to become wrapped up in so you ignore the real issues.

On the evening of November 11, Fox News personalities did not discuss reports from the previous evening that officials at Xe Services, formerly Blackwater Worldwide, had authorized $1 million in bribery payments to Iraqi officials in the aftermath of a fatal shooting involving Blackwater security guards. By contrast, Fox News devoted more than one hour on September 10 to discussing videos of conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posing as a pimp and a prostitute while asking for assistance from employees at an ACORN office.

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater’s president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives. [The New York Times, 11/10/09]

A Media Matters for America review of Fox News programming on November 11, the night after the story broke, indicates that no Fox News host or guest discussed Blackwater or Xe Services, according to transcripts available in the Nexis and Factiva news databases.

We need media that will drag the special interests groups out into public for everyone to see their misdeeds. It won’t happen as long as we keep voting Republican and Democrat though.