Outrage

Your editor will, on occasion, sheepishly admit to being a fan of conspiracy sites. For the most part, they’re a form of entertainment that I find…well, entertaining. They can be dark and dank, but many of them are written by very smart people with startlingly fresh and creative perspectives. You probably know the kind of sites I’m talking about. Some of them are hugely successful.

In this deepening “Greater Depression,” many of these sites are starting to prove themselves to be more than just fantasy and fiction. The terrible things they’ve been predicted are, in more than a few cases, starting to appear to us in our day to day world, and that makes us take a harder look at the other predictions and issue they discuss, to see if those things are coming down the road toward us, still just over the horizon.

For that reason, I sometimes feel like I have to avoid publishing what seems absolutely true to me. I no longer believe it’s impossible for American citizens to be rounded up in the middle of the night for opposing the power structure in this country. The unbelievable fiction I see playing out on the news channels these days suggest to me that the men and woman who have hijacked our Government are dropping all pretense about what they are doing. When I see Barney Frank berating the new ($1 per year) CEO of AIG for paying bonuses that the TARP allowed, and demanding the names of the people who did not return them, is it unreasonable to imagine doors kicked in at 2am?

Am I the only one who is disgusted by the holier than thou attitude of a man who was a regulator of this industry demanding justice for things that happened when he was watching? Am I the only one disgusted by this attitude from a man who had a gay prostitution ring being run out of his house by his live-in lover not that many years ago?

“We get the government we deserve,” the old saying goes. At what point will enough people who don’t live in states clueless enough to elect the likes of Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd say no more?

Then, things will get really interesting.

Big Mistake…BIG Mistake

President Obama has made what historians may well cite as the misjudgement that brought down his promising, young administration’s chances for any kind of success and a second term.

He identified Rush Limbaugh as his enemy.

Big mistake.

It’s assumed that Raum Emmanuel came up with this strategy, and sadly, it shows just how out of touch the people running the White House are.

We are falling headlong into probably the greatest financial catastrophe in the history of our nation. Forget the Great Depression, that event will eclipsed by what we’re entering now. This is bigger. President Barack Hussein Obama didn’t have any more to do with creating this mess than did any other member of the Senate or House. But he did raise his hand and promise himself into the leadership of our Republic. There are questions whether there will be another President after him, presiding over a 50 state Union. There are serious questions being talked about that question exactly how bad things will have to be for him to declare Martial Law and suspend the Constitution of the United States. There are men and women who could be a sufficiently respected President to pull that one off. For reasons that are completely unfair but real nonetheless, he is not one of them.

The White House, in setting Rush up as the head of the resistance, Obama and Emmanuel have annointed an opposition leader with real teeth.

Again, big mistake.

Conservatives are indeed divided. There are the Republicans, who true conservatives are not terribly happy with. The Republican Party is the party that put John McCaine and Sarah Palin on the ticket last November. True conservatives gritted their teeth, held their noses and voted against Obama. The Republican Party is the party that has marginalized Ron Paul, the only vocal member of the party who gets it. The numbers of people in the United States who are infuriated that Dr. Paul’s message is being ignored are big. McCaine was an attempt to get the “moderate” Republicans on board after the difficult Bush years.

The Conservatives, who outnumber Liberals in the U.S. are divided, without a standard bearer. Or, they were, until the White House’s new residents created one for us.

Rush Limbaugh.

I became a fan of Rush in 1988 when his national show began to take off. I’m a conservative voice on the radio myself, a broadcaster since the early 80s. Right now, I keep my writing and my broadcasting on different “channels,” writing under my real name, broadcasting under the name I’ve used in the industry for going on 30 years. I’m an Economist, who has been devoted to the philophies of Milton Friedman since first reading Free to Choose while in college. During the Bush years, I drifted from Rush, not happy with his position as a party “hack” who worked hard to sell Bush’s mistakes to us. I questioned my Conservatism, and as someone who respects and admires Al Gore, regretted my 2000 vote for Bush.

But, seeing the realities of Liberal American Socialism born under the guise of “Change,” I have snapped back to my Conservative roots, quickly rallying with a growing multitude under the Limbaugh standard. The White House has miscalculated, and sent everyone a map and directions to that rally point. If they thought the name “Rush Limbaugh” was one that would repel true conservatives from a central meeting point, they were wrong. Conservatives will find a Rush-led Conservative movement a very compelling place to be, and as the economy worsens, unemployment soars, and more and more of Obama’s promises are broken, the White House will see just what a monster they’ve created, and just how few true Liberals there are, outside the Beltway.

The Answer Has ALWAYS Been In Front of Us

Jim Sinclair’s Mineset reminds us of the great Milton Friedman’s elegant message.

Most people misunderstand Gordon Gekko’s line in the film Wall Street when he said “Greed is good.” The slick, suspendered Gekko made it seem like an evil statement, but Friendman points out that humans don’t reward virtue, they do things for self-interest.

As a young Economics student in the late 70s and early 80s, my interest and belief in the theories of Dr. Friedman were met with scorn by my Keynesian professors.

Well, they were wrong, and their resurgence by the Obama regime will doom millions of us to economic misery, and eventually will sentence millions (if not billions) humans to death by the next World War that is inevitable as our bubble world economy bursts.

Sadly, Donohue hasn’t begun to see misery in the world, yet.

Important New Book – Michael Panzer’s “When Giants Fall”

The author of Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes, Revised and Updated Edition has a new, must-read book  just hitting shelves.

Review coming, but considering the prescience and brilliance of Michael Panzer’s previous work, I believe it’s a must-read for anyone wanting to prepare for the economic and societal shifts bearing down on us right now.

The above mentioned book, Financial Armageddon, called with exceptional clarity, the problems we’re enmeshed in right now, even though our “leaders” and economic “experts” laughed such talk off. Well, they’re not laughing now, but sadly, still in their “leader” and “expert” roles, pretending to know the way out of the woods.

Most of these “architects of our demise” will attempt to marginalize the concepts in this newest Panzer work as well, but will be on the front lines telling us what we need to do to fix the problems when they show up.

The Fog Ahead

Jim Kunstler once again nails it, with the post “State of Cringe” in his “Clusterf**k Nation” section of Kunstler.com.

Discussing the two forks in the road ahead, deflation or inflation, Kunstler agrees with those who suggest (like myself) that it’s not an either/or proposition:

Some of us see both outcomes in sequence: the deflationary “work out” of bad debt currently underway — of loans that will will never be paid back, of acronymic paper securities revealed as frauds, of “non-performing” contracts entering the swamps of foreclosure, of banks pretending to still exist, of hallucinated “wealth” rushing into the cosmic worm-hole of oblivion — can only go for so long before everyone who can go broke will go broke. Then, just as we find ourselves a nation of empty pockets, the tsunami of shoveled-in “money” designed to “reboot the consumer” (created not from productive activity but just printed recklessly), will start churning through the “economy,” chasing products and commodities that became scarce during the deflationary phase — and the result is hyper-inflation, the eraser of debt, destroyer of fortunes, and suicide pill of feckless governments.

Make no mistake about it. We will see a one-two punch that will level this economy, leaving our new President and his administration holding the bag. Did you notice that the Dow yesterday rose while Gold not only held its ground or rose a little, but in fact broke through $900? Sure, most technical analysts were calling $880 an important level, but $900 is a symbolic number that can’t be ignored.

Prices will continue to fall. The faltering demand that is killing retail and wholesale business is bringing prices down. Energy, durables, even food is some cases. But that’s a short-term situation. The TARP’s failure is a sobering glimpse into just how serious the situation is, because it gives us some sense of just how big the “black hole” we’re pouring this newly printed money into is. Eventually, our government will dump enough in to see the result, and that result will be devastating and unstoppable. Our economy and currency is doomed. The hyperinflation caused by this idiocy in Washington will inflate the dollar out of existence.

Many are drawing comparisons in what’s going on right now to the First Great Depression, and that’s a valid exercise. Our civilization’s timeline unfolds in cycles, to be sure, and in terms of human lifespans, those cycles are long. If we leave sufficient records, a civilization looking back on us in a thousand years will probably see these two depressions as one event, the second a direct result of the first. Since we humans live a lifespan of 70 to 100 years, and the last depression began over 70 years (a “lifetime”) ago, we see them as distinct events. We and our future observers are in truth, both right and wrong about it.

The “fog” that keeps us from seeing exactly what’s going on, and what we should individually do about it, is made thicker by the fact that our future isn’t unfolding exactly as our past did. But there are patterns that are important to look for.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the UK’s Telegraph, there’s a case to be made that we’re following a path similar to the 1930s, but the worst, by far, is yet to come.

Obama supporters see the President they elected as a new FDR. Sadly, students of economic and political history agree. So far, the new President is following Roosevelt’s path, a course that those who only concern themselves with slogans and icons believe is the path to salvation. Those who read, study and understand know that FDR’s path led to a longer than necessary depression, ended only by World War and over 400,000 American dead.

Given the weapons of today, a repeat of that sad history will yield far more flag-draped coffins, and will certainly this time,  include a horrifying number of American civilian dead.

Preparation Steps

Many things are cheap right now, but that’s a very short-term situation. Use your dollars’ spending power today to stock up on the things you will need when there are disruptions that make buying them impossible. But don’t just go to Sam’s Club or Costco. Make a list. Start here.

If you’re serious (and you should be), send George Ure of Urban Survival $40 and read (and print) his September 28, 2008 issue of Peoplenomics entitled “A Lifetime of Camping.” It’s the best place to start.