Britannia Radio

 

Annual Big Picture Briefing 
On World Affairs
By Joel Skousen
Editor - World Affairs Brief 
1-1-10

 

Begin Excerpt -   At the end of each year, I dedicate an entire issue to stepping back and taking a broad look at what has happened during the year and to give my readers an analysis of crucial trends in the economy, moral stability, and security. As most of you already sense, things are going from bad to worse very quickly under this Democratic administration. However, virtually every evil trend except government controlled health care began under the Republican Bush administration. For nine years now, ever since the 9/11 attack government has played off of the threat of terror and economic collapse--which they themselves were responsible for or directly caused--to become the sole solution provider in the minds of all citizens.   That's a big part of our current dilemma, the failure of most to see that government power is the problem, not the solution. Another part is the inability of people within the liberty community to understand the nature and power of the conspiring forces arrayed against us and how they operate. Either they can't see the system is rigged or they are too anxious to believe that collapse is imminent. Collapse is not imminent. We are in an inexorable slide toward monetary weakness, world war and world government and they intend to milk every successive crisis to gain more power over individual and national sovereignty.   I'll begin my analysis by providing you with some observations about how the Powers That Be (PTB) use the principles of conflict creation, conflict control and managed "solutions" (the Hegelian Dialectic) to thwart any critics of expanded power and jolt people into accepting change. We will see how they have applied those principles during the past year and how they intend to use them in the future.   The Current Financial Crisis: The credit crisis is not yet over and we can expect more job losses next year. The newspaper print media is being hit especially hard with both internet competition and the downturn in advertising revenue. Editor and Publisher, the flagship publication of the print media is, itself, going under. It bemoaned the fact that "More than 40,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2009, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is nearly twice the 21,000 cut in 2008 and more than any single year in the past 10 years."   Bob Chapman of the International Forecaster predicts, "As we look back and this year comes to an end we find two years of failure. Even government admits to 1-1/2 years of negative growth - a sorry record after having poured trillions of dollars into the economy. The recent 3rd quarter results supposedly broke that record. If it did it was the result of government stimulus and Fed monetization. If you look back further you will find a stock market that rallied 54% just to reflect the highs of 1999. House prices have declined to 1990s levels as well. Both markets, which were bubbles, will fall again next year.   "The dollar will soon end its mini-rally and the USDX will test 71.18 in the first quarter as the euro tests $1.62. Interest rates will stay at zero for at least two years, and mega monetization will continue. As you have just seen the Treasury wants TARP funds for Treasury debt and the administration wants the TARP funds to further stimulate the economy.   "We are told the credit crisis is over and that recovery is underway. We do not believe that. It is projected that as many as 300 more companies will default on debt in 2011. A default rate of 12 to 14 percent. That is up from 1% in 2007 and a long-term average of 4.5%. These are not just small firms, but companies with more than $100 million in assets as well. That doesn't sound like recovery to us."   Like the Great Depression of 1929 to 1941, the current financial crisis is a combination of market fundamentals working to eradicate mal-investments and unstable financial speculation and, in my opinion, the intentional pulling of the plug on a huge market bubble created by rampant insider option trading and speculation. Even though a few highly placed investment bankers profited by shorting the market's fall, personal enrichment was not the sole driving force in crisis. The longer term goal of those in control of money, both then and now, is to facilitate a broad redistribution of capital assets from smaller, over-extended banks and companies to insider banks and corporations that had access to "new money" either on or off the books.   Interesting enough, the insiders can't stop others from joining in and taking advantage of the flood of new money that starts spreading through the economy during inflationary growth, but they can periodically knock the competition out of the game by changing the rules and/or pulling the plug. That's part of what the system is for--rewarding those who go along. I'm not just talking about getting rich either, but going along with unethical and illegal conduct that accompanies this kind of collusion between government and a selection of the private sector. What we are seeing is not green shoots benefiting all sectors of the economy, but a consolidation of financial power into the nine largest investment banks and many other corporations favored by or connected to the federal government, and the Federal Reserve--a private fiat banking system whose most sensitive dealings are completely secret.   Control of a nation's money gives more power than simply providing a currency to facilitate commerce--it can also oil the wheels of corruption, immunity, and blackmail, without public traces. It is the essential element of conspiratorial control. Deficit spending (which avoids unpopular taxation) is used for paying off special interests, judges, Congressmen and people who facilitate corrupt government/business practices. It provides, in addition to the profits derived from government run drug pipelines, funding for the dark side of government (black ops, illegal cover-ups), and the silencing of opposition forces.   Conspiracies are careful that only a few key people have knowledge of the full scope of their goals and operations, although there are many others who are close enough to the inside to see there is a control system. Many think it is benevolent, and for the good of the country, but they see enough of its ruthless nature and consequences for those who get too nosey to know not to ask questions. Knowledge about the existence of and operations of a conspiracy is tightly controlled by liberal use of "need to know" rules and the veil of State Secrets that has been the hallmark of the last 4 administrations. They also prefer to hire predictable people who work in certain directions naturally without much convincing.   In order to make the system work monetarily, The PTB have to maintain an absolute monopoly on the creation of fiat money. They do this through the Federal Reserve system, even though only a minority of money created is actually turned into paper currency. Most money is created by journal entries--no bills required. And, even beyond journal entries, there is a more recent form of money creation whereby various insider-connected investment banks were allowed to develop totally new financial instruments (derivatives, etc) that created futurefinancial obligations in the trillions of dollars and sold them as insurance policies and swaps, securities, and hedges against an almost infinite variety of risks. But the creation of these obligations required no actual money. They were traded solely based on the highly inflated paper asset base of the institutions issuing the obligations.   The PTB also need effective control of the SEC and other financial regulatory bodies in order to allow for these new forms of creative financing that have little or no reserve requirements. That is in large part how bubbles are created-little real money or capital assets are required to begin with, but the speculative fever sucks in billions in real money looking for a higher return. There are a variety of counter-balancing strategies used in trading derivative swaps and hedge options to keep most of these instruments rolling over rather than becoming monetized. Payoffs in actual dollars (monetization) is avoided at all costs, because the nominal dollar value of these derivatives actually exceeds the amount of dollars outstanding by at least twice.   When the bottom fell out of the securitized sub-prime mortgage market was there a sufficient threat to the originators of these instruments that they were forced to come up with actual money to pay them off. That's when the financial crisis was sold to the public and Congress with sufficient panic to induce a bailout bill that literally gave carte blanch powers to the Treasury and the FED. These insiders who held all the key levers of power could buy up any debt no matter how worthless and pay any price to any institution they desired without Congressional control. I doubt that Congress would have done any controlling even if it had reserved the right.   So, that was the crisis-the first stage of the Hegelian dialectic. The crisis was wholly created by the FED and the US Treasury, but blamed on the free-market and "lack of controls." However it was insider connected Congressmen who actually served as conduits for others who wrote these various pieces of legislation creating the legal exception and/or mandates necessary to expand the selling of sub-prime mortgages to unqualified buyers, and the subsequent securitization of debt packages worldwide. Racial preferences were also used to mandate loans to unqualified minorities.   The crisis then leads to an excuse to engage in more profligate government spending as part of the "solution." But, the solution turned out to be false on several counts. First, it was sold as a bailout of Main Street, not Wall Street, even though the bailout funds went almost exclusively to certain insider controlled institutions. Pension funds and local government trust funds had been lured into buying these risky "securitized" mortgages as well as the insurance derivatives which were supposed to guarantee them. They were not bailed out. AIG was the largest recipient of bailouts, and it used that money almost exclusively to cover derivative obligations owed to fellow insider institutions--not the general public.   Naturally, false solutions only give rise to additional crises, but there are an almost unlimited number of variations on those false solutions that can be brought forward to satisfy the public--at least for another six months. There is a kind of unwritten rule in Washington: "give the public a new proposal--any proposal--and if not unduly criticized by commentators in the news, the public will automatically give you six months more time to see what happens." They can keep this up almost indefinitely, knowing that the public never keeps track of past promises--like promises of future budget surpluses--that never materialize.   The only reason the derivatives bubble has not completely melted down is that the FED has privately intervened in the default of these derivatives (on behalf of AIG and others) and is paying off those defaults that are owned by the largest insider banks at par through secret agreements, not made public. Some other obligations are being paid out by revolving TARP funds that never seem to get used up. All of this is the main reason why the FED and the US Treasury are fighting so hard to stop Ron Paul's bill to audit the FED.   Controlling dissent: There always exists a small percentage of thinkers that see through to what is really happening. I'm often surprised when I go back and research the writings and speeches surrounding most major historical crises, that there were always a few significant voices that really saw what was happening. They are, however, always drowned out by establishment voices who outnumbered them and discounted their warnings. You would be surprised how many astute viewers actually saw conspiracies going on clear back in the early 1900s when the Federal Reserve and the income tax were being foisted on the people--not to mention those who saw through the manipulations that led to World Wars I and II. Sadly, modern day history texts omit the stories of these cogent dissenters.   The prime strategies employed by the PTB to control dissent are 1) Don't let the public feel the pain and 2) Deny them crucial information. When the public never has to feel the direct financial pain of foreign wars, foreign aid, welfare, education or financial bailouts, they won't complain--at least not enough to force government to stop. Only those few with educated, ideological views will protest, but they are always in the minority. As I constantly point out, this is why both parties indulge in massive deficit spending rather than taxation--to keep the public quiet. Obviously, deficit spending has its limits, but before those limits are reached, the PTB fully intend to deliver another world crisis sufficiently severe to justify defaulting on that debt. There is no other way out for them. In the aftermath, they'll propose a new system and start all over again.   It's important to keep in mind that there are at least $200 trillion outstanding in monetized dollars internationally. The $3T the FED has created recently to bailout their friends has not been particularly inflationary for two reasons. 1) it's only 1.5% of the dollars outstanding, and 2) almost all of it has gone to replenish the insiders speculative investment accounts which only circulate in the speculative economy--hardly any has gone into the real economy of direct investment in business. It is only when the government starts injecting billions into the hands of consumers that prices start to rise. So we are still a long ways from hyperinflation.   This coming year I do expect more direct bailouts putting more money into consumer's pockets, which will be inflationary. There will be more housing and car incentives and a host of other special interests prosing that their businesses must be bailed out. The PTB have only a short time to keep trumpeting the "green shoots" of recovery before the lie becomes the subject of ridicule. In order to make good on public expectations, more cash will have to be injected directly to consumers. None of this leads to true economic improvement, but it will at least preserve the illusion of recovery, and buy them more time until a world-wide crisis can mature that will give them the excuse to start over.   In strategy number 2, the establishment news media is the prime tool of the government to propagate the official line and denying crucial information to the public. The deception is done primarily by omission rather than outright lying. Establishment news outlets simply refuse to air real opposing points of view but keep repeating the official views of government spokespersons. What private pundits they do allow to comment are carefully selected to ensure they almost never differ significantly with the official position--but enough to give the appearance of an opposition. In reaction to criticism, the mainstream media will sometimes actually tell the whole truth, even about a conspiracy--but they will never repeat it. They know that unless they make a drum beat of an issue, the public will never take notice or get upset sufficiently to demand action.     End Excerpt   World Affairs Brief - Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World   Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted.   Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com   World Affairs Brief, 290 West 580 South, Orem, Ut 84058, USA