Without Federal Reserve intervention in the financial markets since September 2008, the biggest banks in the world would have entered bankruptcy liquidation. The U.S. economy would have experienced a 10% to 20% fall in GDP. The unemployment rate would have soared above 15%. The stock market would have fallen 70%. . . . → Read More: Corporate Fascist Economic System]]> A Fistful Of Dollars:

Without Federal Reserve intervention in the financial markets since September 2008, the biggest banks in the world would have entered bankruptcy liquidation. The U.S. economy would have experienced a 10% to 20% fall in GDP. The unemployment rate would have soared above 15%. The stock market would have fallen 70%. Wealthy bondholders and stockholders would have seen their wealth cut in half. Incumbent politicians would have all been thrown out of office. The richest Americans, constituting the ruling class, would have borne the brunt of the pain.

In a true capitalist system, organizations and people who assumed too much risk and made poor decisions would have failed. But the United States does not have a capitalist system. We have a corporate fascist economic system where a small cartel of bankers, military weapons suppliers, and mega-corporations set the agenda for the country through their complete capture of politicians and the mainstream corporate media.

The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave:

Corporate corruption is out of control for two main reasons. First, big companies are now multinational, while governments remain national. Big companies are so financially powerful that governments are afraid to take them on.

Second, companies are the major funders of political campaigns in places like the US, while politicians themselves are often part owners, or at least the silent beneficiaries of corporate profits. Roughly one-half of US Congressmen are millionaires, and many have close ties to companies even before they arrive in Congress.

As a result, politicians often look the other way when corporate behavior crosses the line. Even if governments try to enforce the law, companies have armies of lawyers to run circles around them. The result is a culture of impunity, based on the well-proven expectation that corporate crime pays.

In the old days, before America lost its collective mind and allowed a fiat currency, government spending was pretty much fixed because the money supply was fixed by . . . → Read More: Government Funded Businesses: Going Where the Money Is]]> It’s always been true, over and over, that corruption is always at its maximum at the end of long booms powered by an expansion of money.

In the old days, before America lost its collective mind and allowed a fiat currency, government spending was pretty much fixed because the money supply was fixed by the relatively-unchanging supply of gold.

Nowadays, however, the government gave the absurd and incompetent Federal Reserve the right to allow banks to create as much money as anyone wanted.

The famous bank robber, Willie Sutton said, when asked why he robbed banks, that he did it because “That’s where the money is.”

Today, Willie Sutton would be asked why he has a string of businesses that gets its funding from government, because “That’s where the money is” since this is where the massive government deficit-spending first enters into the economy, and this is where the corruption gets its start, which I already know from history, but even I am amazed and angry at the towering corruption and incompetence everywhere you look, and new ones being exposed with every tick of the clock.

I am thinking of these things because of the precarious situation at work, where my boss is going to be performing a Secret Special Interim Employee Performance Review on me, although I did not even know there was even such a damned thing as a “Secret Special Interim Employee Performance Review”, which is not in the employee handbook nor in the Policy and Procedures Manual, and when I ask my boss what this is all about, she says, with a tone of scorn and disrespect, “What does it sound like, moron? Get back to work!”

Stung and hurt by the bitter rebuke, I turn to leave, and as I do so, I say under my breath so she can’t hear me, “Touché! But let me ask you who is the moron who is not buying gold, silver and oil in response to the horrific inflationary implications of the Federal Reserve creating so unbelievably much money and the socialist Obama administration borrowing and spending all that impossibly much money? So you want touché? I’ll give you touché, moron! Hahaha!”

Before I scurried back to my office in a big panic to destroy any incriminating evidence and, at least, sweep out the old chicken bones, empty pizza boxes and tequila bottles to kind of, you know, spruce the place up a little bit, I swing by and ask the people in Personnel what in the hell a Secret Special Interim Employee Performance Review is, which, for some reason, makes them get all huffy about how they are the few, the proud, the brave, the Human Resources Department, and not some lowly “Personnel Department”, and where in the hell have I been for the last 20 years?

So I say, “What?” as in, “What they hell does that have to do with anything?” and they reply, “Well, if you don’t know what you want, we can’t help you. Goodbye!”

And then they just walk off! They start pretending that they are doing something important and engrossing that requires them to have their backs to me while ignoring me yelling, “What in the hell is a ‘Secret Special Interim Employee Performance Review’, you morons?”

Getting no response, I continue rebuking them, “It obviously has something to do with your precious ‘human resources’, you incompetent halfwits! I noticed that you were always so delighted to help when it was filing relevant papers in my ‘permanent record’, like that time when my boss told me, and I agreed in writing, that I understood that I had to come to work on time, every damned day, like some kind of stupid robot or something, or that other time where you had to file a similarly signed ‘contract’ where I agreed that this also included staying at work all day, and only going home at ‘an agreed-upon quitting time (‘see Schedule A, attached’), also like I am some kind of workaholic robot or something, which brings up that time when you had to file my agreement to actually DO some damn work while I was here all day, which turned out to be the worst part! Gaaaahhhh!”

Well, I never did find out what a ‘Secret Special Interim Employee Performance Review’ was, but there were enough ominous clues that I instinctively went to Mogambo Plan A (MPA), which was to set my office on fire to destroy everything, burning it all to smoldering ashes, including any clues about anything, since I don’t know what they will be investigating and am paranoid enough to suspect a zillion things.

Now that I have had time to think about it, though, I realize that is too radical.

Mogambo Plan B (MPB), which I just thought of, is to blame former Federal Reserve chairman (1987-2006) Alan Greenspan, as he is directly responsible for all of the misery that people have suffered so far, and which is, unfortunately, just a taste of what is to come.

There are those who protest that my abysmal job performance has anything to do with monetary policy, and to those people I say, “Ha! The odious Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the despicable Federal Reserve, is the guy who ordered the Fed to create a corrupt, criminally-incompetent, continual flow of new money and credit through the banks, which, I hasten to remind you, is actually where money is created – as if by magic! – by the banks at the instant someone borrows this supply of new credit from the Fed, which increases both the money supply and total debt, which is not the point I was trying to make, but that it is this increase in money which creates inflation in prices that destroys everything it touches in a Big, Bankrupting Boom (BBB)!”

I can almost see the look of doubt in their eyes as their lips say, “And how does that affect the crappy way you have been doing your job?”

“Well,” I will explain, “At the end of long booms of monetary malfeasance, especially when using a fiat currency that makes the whole economic farce last far, far longer, and get far, far more destructive than when such idiocy had been tried under a strict money supply like under a gold standard, the amount of corruption and incompetence is literally off-the-charts, and since I am not corrupt, but only incompetent, irritating and argumentative, then I am a better-than-average employee!”

I am hoping that it will work, and in the meantime, I am hoping that my investment in gold, silver and oil pays off sooner than I expect, because, truly then, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

Government Funded Businesses: Going Where the Money Is originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning.

Glenn Greenwald elaborates on just how friggin’ big and bloated the US “defense” budget is over at Salon. My shorter version:

The US spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on “defense.” It spends six times as much as the . . . → Read More: If Obama’s Not Serious About Freezing or Cutting “Defense” Spending …]]> … then he’s not serious about freezing or cutting spending.

Glenn Greenwald elaborates on just how friggin’ big and bloated the US “defense” budget is over at Salon. My shorter version:

The US spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on “defense.” It spends six times as much as the next-largest “defense” spender (China), and 29 times as much as the six top “rogue states” (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) combined.

And let’s be truthful here: US “defense” spending is mostly just a gigantic corporate welfare program — a way of redistributing wealth from the taxpayer to the politicians’ corporate cronies (and if a few hundred thousand people have to die every few years to keep the gravy train running, no problem as long as most of those people are evil, swarthy furriners). The actual national defense requirements of the US come to a small fraction of the amount spent under that label. Politicians and corporate welfare queens like the label because they can call anyone who objects to spending under it “unpatriotic.”

If Obama was serious about a discretionary spending “freeze,” he’d include the Department of Defense in that freeze. If he was serious about balancing the budget, he wouldn’t stop there, either. He’d propose a 25% cut to DoD over the three-year “freeze” period, and ask for a much larger cut over a longer time period.

So, now we know Obama isn’t serious.

Specifically, just say no to this:

[U]nder my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise — likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to . . . → Read More: What Individuals Should Do About ObamaCare]]> To quote Nancy Reagan, “just say no”.

Specifically, just say no to this:

[U]nder my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise — likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers. There will be a hardship waiver for those individuals who still can’t afford coverage, and 95 percent of all small businesses, because of their size and narrow profit margin, would be exempt from these requirements. But we can’t have large businesses and individuals who can afford coverage game the system by avoiding responsibility to themselves or their employees. Improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part.

To forestall immediate descent into partisan Obama bashing, a brief digression: Obama cribbed the “individual mandate” described above from “conservative” Republican Mitt Romney, who signed it into law as governor of Massachusetts and then bragged about / defended it (rather than vetoing it as he did eight other provisions of the law, including an “employer mandate” similar to the one described above) in 2006. So please … don’t try to turn this into a “left/right” thing.

The insurance companies are drooling over this, of course, and their water carriers in Congress from both major parties will support it (while quietly gutting the “unicorns and ice cream for everyone” restrictions on pre-existing condition refusal, payment caps, etc.) if they can get away with supporting it.

So, the first thing to do is let your congresscritter know that (s)he can’t get away with supporting it.

The second thing? Obey little, resist much.

It just so happens that I am, at this particular moment, insured. And while I’m glad, at this particular moment, to be insured (I have dental coverage, and that coverage is saving me about $1200 on the mass extraction/denture procedure I’m getting ready for — for those who have been following the saga, I got the molds made last week and should get the teeth yanked some time in the two to four weeks), I’ve lived a good part of my life without insurance.

If the proposal described in President Obama’s speech is passed and signed into law, I’ll be returning to uninsured status ASAP — and giving anyone who comes calling to collect a fine a close-up look at my middle finger when I hold out my hands for them to put the cuffs on.

Anyone who’s in a position to do likewise, should.