“Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
Ron Paul Revolution: Crying Ronald Goebbels
Great post below from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish on the Warcons’ increasingly amusing attempts to smear Dr. Paul as an anti-semite:
“The right has a new line of attack: some Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans support him! Muslims supporting Republicans? The horror … Look, it seems to me that Paul needs to do better at trying to distance himself from some others on the fringes, and his campaign is still a little not-prime-time in dealing with the usual suspects. But the general line of questioning – “Are you now and have you ever been an anti-Semite?” – is offensive. As Derb points out:
Has anyone else noticed that “Ron Paul” almost rhymes with “Goebbels,” if you drop the “s”? And look—it has the same number of syllables!
I see no reason why the campaign should not return any money given by neo-Nazis who are subsequently identified as such. But Jonah is right that this whole thing tells us more about Paul’s amateurism in rapid-response than anything else. It’s also a function of some neocons’ unfortunate tendency to cry anti-Semitism if anyone disagrees with them on foreign policy. Meanwhile, Wonkette offers a bipartisan “anti-Paultard” olive branch to RedState. Heh.”
Sullivan also has it right about the wind behind the Paul campaign:
“Along with conservative desperation at the Republican betrayal, no one else is urging a withdrawal from Iraq. It’s as simple as that, in some ways. And in Iowa, that could mean something: 53 percent of Republicans there want a withdrawal of all US troops within six months. The poll also confirms Huckabee’s current second place and the extremely tight race among the Dems. And check this out:
2. Do you see President George W. Bush as a conservative Republican in the mode of Ronald Reagan?
Yes 7%
No 74%
Undecided 19%
Comment:
My take on the reasons why Ron Paul has the following he has:
1. The number one spot goes to Paul’s record on Iraq: He voted no to going in, and he’s also the only one willing to advocate immediate withdrawal. I don’t mean just from Iraq, but from from the Warcon’s bloody little daydream (more like a psycho nightmare) of taking over planet earth (and a chunk of space) and killing anyone who objects too strenuously. Let’s just say Paul has an adult’s foreign policy.
2. A close second – and maybe even sharing first spot – is widening appreciation of the level of corruption and financial finagling that’s all in a day’s work on Wall Street. The college crowd seems to have got it. I was talking to a nineteen- year old the other day, who wasn’t especially political. And I got a earful about the bankruptcy of American empire, the rise of China, the death of the dollar, and – ye gods – the federal reserve.
Voting? Pure waste of time, he said, with a shrug. Both parties were full of it
I didn’t ask what.
Update:
I forgot the third major reason. It’s an important one too. Immigration. Looks like most of the pols have a tin-ear about it. We the People – left and right, natives and immigrants — can’t believe it’s this difficult for all these Ivy League educated yuppy lawyers to understand:
If illegals can get driver’s licenses — why should anyone bother becoming a citizen?
Oh, they’ll be driving anyway, you say? Here’s a thought. How about making car dealerships require a valid license before you buy a car. I mean, we seem to be able to have some kind of requirement for buying guns — which are a lot less deadly to the general population.
Banking bloodbath: the flight to liquidity continues…..
“All US quoted banks will have to publish asset figures in conformity with FAS 157 by next spring. The new rules divide bank assets into three “levels”, according to the freedom with with which they can be bought or sold. Level-one assets, which are easy to value or trade, have to have quoted prices in active markets such as US government bonds or gold bullion. Level two is an intermediate stage; these assets are not as fully marketable as level one, but still sufficiently tradeable to have a definite value.
Level-three assets – usually artificial financial instruments – are the problem. They do not have quoted prices in active markets. They have to be valued by reference to the bank’s own models. According to the analyst Martin Hutchinson, who had analysed some of the US banks, the holdings of level-three assets are substantial. Lehman has $22 billion; Bear Stearns $20 billion; JP Morgan Chase $60 billion. Even these figures may be understated, since the banks have themselves decided whether assets belong to level three or the more acceptable level two, and they have an interest in placing as little in level three and as much in level two as they reasonably can.
Martin Hutchinson has also analysed the assets of Goldman Sachs. The bank has disclosed $72 billion of level-three assets, out of total assets of $900 billion. That seems reasonable enough, but it compares with Goldman Sachs’s capital of $36 billion. Any substantial write off of level-three assets would impact on Goldman Sachs net asset value.
One cannot say that FAS 157 is only an American regulation and the banks of other countries would not therefore be affected. Most global banks already have a listing in the United States that would therefore be subject to US accounting standards. Those that do not will be judged by FAS 157 as the international standard. From now on all major banks will have to declare their assets in the FAS 157 form with its division into different levels by marketability.
No doubt this is the reform that should have been introduced years ago; that would have saved a great deal of agony and some abuse. But FAS 157 is coming into effect at a most inconvenient time. The sub-prime mortgage defaults have already undermined confidence in mortgage banked securities. These form a significant part – perhaps about a quarter – of all level-three assets. Level three also includes higher-quality mortgages and leveraged bridged loans for buyouts.
The global banking system now faces the risk of a general flight towards cash and liquid level one assets on a scale that has not been seen since the early 1930s. Already British banks are showing signs of near panic. I hear of London banks going back on recently agreed loans to parties of good credit, presumably on orders from head office.
There have also been cancellations of offers of credit cards that had already been approved. One need have little sympathy for the US investment banks; they found it profitable to make speculative loans, and now they are paying the price….”
More at The Times.
Comment:
Any moment now the ongoing liquidity crisis will turn into a full-fledged credit crunch….
Chinese best-seller takes on kooky fortunes and currency wars…
“The Battle of Waterloo. The deaths of six US presidents. The rise of Adolf Hitler. The deflation of the Japanese bubble economy, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and even environmental destruction in the developing world.
In a new Chinese best-seller, Currency Wars , these disparate events spanning two centuries have a single root cause: the control of moneyissuance through history by the Rothschild banking dynasty.
Even today, claims author Song Hongbing, the US Federal Reserve remains a puppet of private banks, which also ultimately owe their allegiance to the ubiquitous Rothschilds.
Such an over-arching conspiracy theory might matter as little as the many fetid tracts that can still be found in the west about the “gnomes of Zurich” and Wall Street’s manipulation of global finance.
But in China, which is in the midst of a lengthy debate about opening itsfinancial system under US pressure, the book has become a surprise hit andis being read at senior levels of government and business.
“Some senior heads of companies have been asking me if this is all true,”says Ha Jiming, the chief economist of China International Capital Corp, thelargest local investment bank.
The book also gives ammunition, however hay-wire, to many in China who argue that Beijing should resist pressure from the US and other countries to allow its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate….”
More by Richard McGregor at the Financial Times.
Comment:
Here we enter the world of conspiracy theory….but here’s a thought. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you…
Ron Paul Revolution – not a man of the state…but a statesman
“Paul was a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard from 1963 to 1968; he was not assigned to serve in Vietnam. In 40 years as an OB-GYN in the Lake Jackson area, he estimates, he has delivered more than 4,000 babies.It pains Carol Paul to hear her husband booed or criticized by rivals during debates, but she takes pride in his attitude. “He has no animosity to these people,” she said. “He forgives. But I don’t know if he can ever forgive about the war, the boys we’ve lost and the fact we went in for lies.”
Ron Paul is the only GOP candidate unequivocally opposed to the Iraq war and was the only Republican representative who did not vote in support of it. He is also the rare congressman who refuses a Congressional pension, because he considers the use of taxpayer money in this fashion an abuse of power. For the same reason, he never accepted taxpayer-funded Medicare or Medicaid in his practice, nor did he allow his children to take federal loans for college.
Paul appears financially comfortable but not exceedingly wealthy, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Most of his holdings are in about two dozen gold and silver firms, many valued at less than $15,000 and none valued at more than $250,000….”
More at the Chicago Tribune in a profile on Paul.
Ron Paul Revolution: Time for A Texan Tea Party
Time to go Boston again…
Worldwide Ron Paul Tea Party???
How about this for an idea? Who else was like me and felt left out of the fun on November the 5th? The excitment of seeing the donations flood it was just what a campaign should feel like!Well how about one of the trusted American meetup groups set up an official Worldwide Tea Party Chipin? Then everyone around the world can donate to this chipin, just as our American friends make their official donations. That chipin can then be used for something specific, or just spread amongst key Meetup groups in the states? Good idea? If so, how about some promotion of it too!Glad to see there are people in this country helping to awaken others!
Click here to check out
The London Ron Paul 2008 Meetup Group!
From Brits4Ron Paul.
Shock Doctrine Sham: Torture without Milton Friedman…
Memo to Naomi Klein — torture’s been around for centuries — with and without capitalism.
To wit.:
“‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’
He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.
‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’
His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. ‘An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,’ she said. ‘One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead…..”
More on the unpleasantness at Camp 22 in North Korea , by Antony Barnett at the Guardian.
Financial Floozies: Japanese PM scolds market for being a market…
“Versus the Japanese Yen, the US Dollar regained ¥1 from its 18-month low of ¥109.40 after Yasuo Fukuda, prime minister of Japan since the administration of Shinzo Abe collapsed in Sept., warned currency speculators to “be careful” of backing the Yen to rise.
“In the short term, Yen appreciation would certainly be a problem,” Fukuda told the Financial Times. “Any kind of sudden change in exchange rates would not be desirable.
Pointing to the Yen’s sudden 18-month highs against the Dollar, “it really is a reflection of the state of the
“What I am saying is be careful so that [intervention] will not happen.”
According to The Economist‘s Big Mac Index of purchasing power, the Yen remains more than 25% under-valued today. The British Pound, on the other hand, is now around 22% over-valued against the US Dollar – and yet the cost of living for British consumers continues to rise regardless, driven by near-zero rates of real interest paid on bank savings after tax and inflation.”
Ron Paul Revolution: The Dollar Crisis
“Since Ron Paul has raised the issue of the gold standard, and is being treated like some kind of visitor from Mars for having mentioned the subject at all, we need to know more about the true American heritage of the gold standard. This is why I’m personally very fired up that the Mises Institute has brought back William Gouge’s Short History of Money and Banking, which I first read while working for Ron in his congressional office.
Gouge lived from 1796 through 1863 and was involved in all the great debates on banking in the 19th century. His book is a major attack on all inflationary finance, and reading him underscores just how universal are the lessons on money and banking — universal in the sense that they apply in all times and all places.
Back in the 19th century, there were many people who wanted inflation: bankers, debtors, and the government. What a surprise! Who has an interest in sound money? Consumers, savers, and liberty-loving citizens. This is the essential conflict. Are we going to have a monetary regime rooted in robbery, or one rooted in honesty? Gouge was on the side of honesty, and he inspires us today.
Coming a few decades later, but along the same lines, is Charles Holt Carroll’s Organization of Debt Into Currency. This is one of those books that develops a hard-core cadre of fans. When we started reprinting these great American economic classics, people began to ask us: what about Carroll? Well, here it is, and once you get into the book, you realize why Rothbard and George Reisman and so many others swear by it. He patiently explains the difference between money and debt and how the government goes about sowing confusion about what is what.
Now, Ron Paul stands in this tradition of thinkers in every way. Even on the campaign stump, he speaks about the evil of fiat money and Fed management of the nation’s money stock. In a true sense, he says, we’ve put a cartelized gang of central planners in charge of the good that constitutes half of every economic exchange, and we are paying the price in terms of declining purchasing power, exchange-rate chaos, rampant debt, and growing crises in sector after sector.
Is there a way out? Most certainly! It goes by the name of gold. Make the dollar as good as gold and you eliminate the inflation problem and the business cycles that go along with it. Here is the great secret of the gold standard. The problem is not that it is unviable from the perspective of economics; the problem is that there are many people allied against it: the big banks, the creditor class, and government. You see, gold would provide a hard-core anchor for liberty.
Under the right form of the gold standard, government could no longer spend with impunity or run up debt without limit. The resources it spent would have to be raised the old-fashioned way.
It behooves every American to read Ron’s book, really his manifesto on the topic. It is called The Case for Gold. He covers 19th-century monetary history and discusses several plans for instituting a gold standard.”
Ron Paul Revolution: bank-bungle or bank-boozle?
“According to data compiled by the World Gold Council, the Swiss sales peaked in 2002, 2003 and 2004, when they sold around 280 tonnes each year.
Based on the average market prices in those years, the Swiss probably raised about $14 billion from the sales.
The value of that bullion, as of Friday? Try $34 billion — or $20 billion more.
Those missed profits work out at about $2,700 for every man, woman and child in Switzerland.
The Swiss weren’t alone. The Bank of England chose 1999-2001 to halve its total gold holdings. It sold 395 tonnes at an average price of around $275.
Oops. Two hundred years ago, the British might have hanged the man responsible for a blunder of this scale. At the very least they would have shipped him off to Australia in leg irons. He ended up costing Her Majesty’s Treasury $6.9 billion in lost profits (based on Friday’s price).
Today? They make him prime minister. Most Americans know little about Gordon Brown, the dour Scot who recently took over as PM from Tony Blair. But for 10 years, until this spring, he served as Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Britain’s chief finance minister. And among his landmark moves was this decision to auction off the nation’s gold….”
Comment:
That sale was made against professional advice from the Bank of England.
Ditto for Holland and Spain.
More on this apparent wave of stupidity in high places in the UK, Holland, Spain, and Switzerland by Brett Arends at The Street.com.
And there’s a hint of where the idea for the sale originated here:
“The World Gold Council, a lobbying group for the industry, said this week that the drop in prices over the past two months would reduce the gold export earnings of the world’s heavily indebted countries by more than dollars 150 million a year, or more than the debt relief that the IMF gold sales would finance.
“Selling IMF gold reserves will do more harm than good,” said Gary Mead, head of research for the council.
But it has taken several years for the major industrial nations to agree on gold sales, and officials made clear they did not intend to abandon the plan. Lawrence Summers, the U.S. deputy Treasury secretary, told Congress on Thursday that the Treasury Department would work to ensure that the IMF sale would not have a “meaningful impact on gold prices.”
The planned sales by Britain, Switzerland and the IMF total the equivalent of about six months of global demand for gold….” (Central Bank Sales Could Finish the Decline that Low Inflation Started, International Herald Tribune, June 19, 1999).
Some legwork about the stupid officials seems in order, to be filed under, Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave…
1. Gordon Brown, now UK PM, was for over ten years (the longest tenure of a chancellor) Chancellor of the Exchequer. One of his first acts was to make the Bank of England operationally independent when it came to monetary policy (i.e. setting of interest rates).
Between 1999 and 2002, while Chancellor, Brown sold 60% of the UK’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce. a 20-year low. He pressured the IMF to do the same, but it resisted.
Gavyn Davies, former UK partner of Goldman Sachs (who now heads up the BBC) is a close friend of Brown’s. Davies’ wife, Susan Nye, was office manager to Brown when he was Chancellor.
You’d think savvy Gavy would give better advice to his pals, eh?
2. The activist group, GATA, has for long argued that the big banks had their heads together with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fiund (IMF) and various central banks to keep the price of gold artificially low to diguise inflation and the real weakness of the US dollar. GATA has even filed suit over this charge.
(see my articles on IMF gold manipulation and Goldman Sachs).
And more history:
“For instance, there were a few key words uttered by former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan when he appeared before Congress in July of 1998. Greenspan was testifying as to why the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should not concern itself with regulation of derivatives traded in the over-the-counter market……..
Greenspan waved off the necessity for the CFTC to regulate gold derivatives, telling Congress to fear not, that the “central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.”
Oops. Bet he wishes he hadn’t let that slip. As Chris points out, “Greenspan was telling Congress that the purpose of gold leasing was not what the central banks had been telling the world—to earn a little money on a dead asset. The real purpose of gold leasing was to suppress the gold price. His remarks are still posted on the Federal Reserve’s Internet site.” [they are—we checked]
Other confirmations of the central bank price rigging scheme include a rather blatant admission from William R. White, head of the Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS. In late June of 2005, White delivered the opening remarks to the Fourth Annual BIS Conference on the “Past and Future of Central Bank Cooperation,” an elite gathering of “central bankers and academics.” Among the latter were “economists and economic historians,” as well as, for the first time, “political scientists interested in political and other processes, and the development of institutions to support such processes.”
White’s speech enumerated five “intermediate objectives of central bank cooperation.” The fifth, and last, of these was “the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful.” [emphasis added]
Useful to whom? Well, probably not to the average investor.
Then there is the Washington Agreement—signed in September of 1999 by representatives of the ECB and the central banks of Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and England—which spelled out how the banks would cooperate in the regulation of the gold market. (The U.S., while not a signatory, hosted the announcement of the agreement, and may be assumed to be supportive of it, if not a direct participant.) It placed a limit on how much they could collectively sell in any given year.
The alleged reason for the Washington Agreement was to control the amount of gold being sold by central banks, in order to keep the price high and protect the value of those banks’ holdings……
Chris sees the agreement as a smokescreen, a way of deceiving all but the insiders as to what’s actually going on. It allows the central banks to say that they’re taking the initiative to limit gold sales, which is true of physical gold. But while they do that with one hand, with the other they ramp up the action in the derivatives markets—forward sales, options, swaps and shorts—thereby maintaining the artificially low price of gold.
That argument is bolstered by BIS statistics showing that gold derivative transactions ballooned from $234 to $354 billion, an all-time high, in the first six months of 2006. Conversely, though, it has been a very uneven progression. For all of 2005, derivatives activity actually fell. So a firm conclusion is difficult to draw……
“By the bullion banks shorting gold,” Chris says, “they deceived the world about the level of inflation and money supply growth, and basically they shorted gold to buy U.S. government bonds and collect the difference. If you’ve been assured that the gold price is going down, you short the metal and use the proceeds to buy government bonds. You’re getting 5% on government bonds and the gold price is going down 5% a year, enabling you to close the short profitably, so you have a risk-free trade. You’re getting 10%, as long as the central banks are willing to back you with more gold sales to keep the gold price going down. And I think everybody was happy with that. Financial houses, recruited as the banks’ agents, were happy with their easy profits. The Treasury Department was happy because it boosted bond prices and kept interest rates down. And the whole world was deceived about the vast growth that was going on in the money supply. It worked for a while. Until they started worrying that they were running out of gold reserves.”
…………………
Thinking about all this, it seems to us that the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the European central banks were engaging in some mighty risky behavior. Chris agrees and says that, in fact, the house of cards almost came tumbling down when gold spiked in late 1999, in the aftermath of the Washington Agreement, and created a short squeeze…..
Since then, of course, steadily rising demand has driven the gold price ever higher. Ongoing market rigging has been unable to suppress it, but has served to prevent the metal from finding its true equilibrium point, in Chris’ opinion. He believes that a day of reckoning will come. And what will that look like?
“Well, I don’t want to make any hard predictions about what will happen, or when,” he says. “But what I think is that we’re going to wake up someday and find out that the Western central banks have met—along with, maybe, some of the Asian central banks—and there are going to be new currency arrangements. Maybe in the name of helping the poor countries, the central banks are going to be buying gold at $1,500 an ounce or something like that. It’ll probably happen overnight, because I don’t think the central banks can withstand a steady escape from the paper currencies into the monetary metals. If they do it overnight, everybody’s locked into the fiat system, there’s no getting out. Either you’ve got your gold and silver or you don’t, and there’s no incentive to get out of the whole central bank system.”
That sounded to us like a sudden and massive devaluation of the buck.”