Leonard Cohen sums it up perfectly in his song, “Everyone Knows.”

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

John Law’s Ponzi Scam

John Law said that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone. He went on to say, "I can tell you my secret!" The financier went on to say, "It is to make gold out of paper." Today we call it a "Ponzi Scheme."

Just as David Stockman stated in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse." The G.O.P. has followed the exact same financial plan as John Law, the Scottish mathematician and gambler was an adviser to the Regent of France, who struggled to repair the nation's finances, ruined in the wars of Louis XIV.

Whereas money was previously seen as a store of value, Law saw it just as a medium of exchange. He wrote that, “Money is not the value for which goods are exchanged but the value by which they are exchanged; the use of money is to buy goods, and silver, and gold, while money, is of no other use.” (Just like Glen Beck is preaching “Buy Gold” on his TV show)

The problem is that from time to time, investors will want to realize those claims and will be disappointed when they cannot do so; the higher the claims are relative to Gross Domestic Product, the greater the disruption and loss of confidence when those periods financially crash; just as they occurred in the last years of G.W. Bush’s administration.

Allow me to approach this topic from another direction. During the Civil War, the Southern Confederacy was selling bonds backed by their cotton crop resources. Britain being a large importer of this cotton for their value added textile industries, invested in these bonds. When the Union North blockaded the Southern ports and General Sherman slashed and burned the cotton fields, the bonds were rendered worthless and the South’s monetary system crashed. In the mean time, Britain soon found alternative cotton sources in Egypt, India and China.

Just as our recent monetary value was based on our G.D.P. only to have U.S. Multi-National Corporations transfer the value add industries into foreign interests such as China, so goes our monetary stability.

As I have often referred to the book, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," (generally referred to by the short title "The Wealth of Nations") is the masterpiece of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, who in summation stated that the true wealth of a nation is based on its ability to have the “Value Added” industries that convert raw material into viable product. For the last couple of decades but more during the G.W. Bush administration’s period, these value added manufacturing industries have been moved to China by U.S. Corporations. This is why China is now moved into the position of second largest financial market and will take over the number one position replacing the United States in the next decade.

Today it is not uniquely tangable to see that as China is seeing double digit financial growth while the citizens of the United States are enduring layoffs, and the devaluation of their personal wealth.

Be prepared to start hearing the slogan, “Viva la Revolution!” yet once again.

"How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy."

Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse." Remember David Stockman? He was the “Financial Wonder Kid” that upon seeing the Reaganomics Plan, instantly call it, “Voodoo Economics!” Many may remember well when President Reagan took him aside to the preverbal “Woodshed” and scolded him for not playing along with the Reaganomics Plan.

I have decided to post this as this is exactly what I have been saying how MY REPUBLICAN PARTY has been taken over by CROOKS and CON MEN, WITH A FOLLOWING OF NON-THINKING LEMMINGS.

Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "DESTROYED" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse."

Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats' Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider, someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology and coined the phrase of President Regan’s, “Voodoo Economics,” says about America, helps all of us better understand how America's toxic partisan-politics "holy war" is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.

But why focus on Stockman's message? It's already lost in the 24/7 news cycle. Why? We need some introspection. Ask yourself: How did the great nation of America lose its moral compass and drift so far off course, to where our very survival is threatened?
We've arrived at a historic turning point as a nation that no longer needs outside enemies to destroy us, we are committing suicide. Democracy. Capitalism. The American dream. All dying. Why? Because of the economic decisions of the GOP the past 40 years, says this leading Reagan Republican.

Please listen with an open mind, no matter your party affiliation: This makes for a powerful history lesson, because it exposes how both parties are responsible for destroying the U.S. economy. Read Carefully:

Reagan Republican: the GOP should file for bankruptcy Stockman rushes into the ring swinging like a boxer: "If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt, will soon reach $18 trillion." It screams "out for austerity and sacrifice." But instead, the GOP insists "that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase."

In the past 40 years Republican ideology has gone from solid principles to hype and slogans. Stockman says: "Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses too."
No more. Today there's a "new catechism" that's "little more than money printing and deficit finance, vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes" making a mockery of GOP ideals. Worse, it has resulted in "serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy." Yes, GOP ideals backfired, crippling our economy.

Stockman's indictment warns that the Republican Party's "new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one:"

Stage 1. Nixon irresponsible, dumps gold, U.S starts spending binge.
Richard Nixon's gold policies get Stockman's first assault, for defaulting "on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world." So for the past 40 years, America's been living "beyond our means as a nation" on "borrowed prosperity on an epic scale ... an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves."
Remember Friedman: "Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct." Friedman was wrong by trillions. And unfortunately "once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors."
And without discipline America was also encouraging "global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve." Yes, the road to the coming apocalypse began with a Republican president listening to a misguided Nobel economist's advice.

Stage 2. Crushing debts from domestic excesses, war mongering.
Stockman says "the second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40% of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970." Who's to blame? Not big-spending Democrats, says Stockman, but "from the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

Back "in 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts," but Stockman makes clear, they had to be "matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration's hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces, the welfare state and the warfare state, that drive the federal spending machine."

OK, stop a minute. As you absorb Stockman's indictment of how his Republican party has "destroyed the U.S. economy," you're probably asking yourself why anyone should believe a traitor to the Reagan legacy. I believe party affiliation is irrelevant here. This is a crucial subject that must be explored because it further exposes a dangerous historical trend where politics is so partisan it's having huge negative consequences.
Yes, the GOP does have a welfare-warfare state: Stockman says "the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending, exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans' fiscal religion."

When Fed chief Paul Volcker "crushed inflation" in the '80s we got a "solid economic rebound." But then "the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts." By 2009, they "reduced federal revenues to 15% of gross domestic product," lowest since the 1940s. Still today they're irrationally demanding an extension of those "unaffordable Bush tax cuts that would amount to a bankruptcy filing."

Recently Bush made matters far worse by "rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures." Bush also gave in "on domestic spending cuts, signing into law $420 billion in nondefense appropriations, a 65% percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy." Takes two to tango.

Stage 3. Wall Street's deadly “vast, unproductive expansion.”Stockman continues pounding away: "The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector." He warns that "Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation." Wrong, not oblivious. Self-interested Republican loyalists like Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner knew exactly what they were doing.

They wanted the economy, markets and the government to be under the absolute control of Wall Street's too-greedy-to-fail banks. They conned Congress and the Fed into bailing out an estimated $23.7 trillion debt. Worse, they have since destroyed meaningful financial reforms. So Wall Street is now back to business as usual blowing another bigger bubble/bust cycle that will culminate in the coming "American Apocalypse."

Stockman refers to Wall Street's surviving banks as "wards of the state." Wrong, the opposite is true. Wall Street now controls Washington, and its "unproductive" trading is "extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives." Wall Street banks like Goldman were virtually bankrupt, would have never survived without government-guaranteed deposits and "virtually free money from the Fed's discount window to cover their bad bets."

Stage 4. New American Revolution class-warfare coming soon.
Finally, thanks to Republican policies that let us "live beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore," while at home "high-value jobs in goods production ... trade, transportation, information technology and the professions shrunk by 12% to 68 million from 77 million."
As the apocalypse draws near, Stockman sees a class-rebellion, a new revolution, a war against greed and the wealthy and soon. The trigger will be the growing gap between economic classes: No wonder "that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1% of Americans, paid mainly from the Wall Street casino, received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90%, mainly dependent on Main Street's shrinking economy, got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market's fault. It's the decaying fruit of bad economic policy."

Get it? The decaying fruit of the GOP's bad economic policies is destroying our economy.

Warning: this black swan won't be pretty, will shock, soon
His bottom line: "The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing, it's a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach, balanced budgets, and sound money and financial discipline is needed more than ever."

Wrong: There are far bigger things to "pity."
First, that most Americans, 300 million, are helpless, will do nothing, sit in the bleachers passively watching this deadly partisan game like it's just another TV reality show.

Second, that, unfortunately, politicians are “so deep in the pockets” of the Wall Street conspiracy that controls Washington they are helpless and blind.

Third, there's a depressing sense that Stockman will be dismissed as a traitor, his message lost in the 24/7 news cycle until the final apocalyptic event, an unpredictable black swan triggers another, bigger global meltdown, followed by a long Great Depression II and a historic class war.

So be prepared, it will hit soon, when you least expect it!!

I intend for my next posting to be on John Law, the Scotsman who handled the budget of France based on a Ponzi Scheme that when it crashed……It started the French Revolution. History Repeats Itself!!!

Dancing for Mao And Now The Tea Party

A photograph of a 5-year-old girl made her famous in China

Little Li Zhensheng the young girl with unusually fair hair tied in ponytails, dancing with her arms upraised and surrounded by smiling, clapping soldiers.
They were at the Red Guard Stadium in Harbin, in northern China, along with hundreds of thousands of Communist Party cadres, workers, peasants and other soldiers who had gathered for a marathon conference on the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong. This was 1968, nearly two years into the Cultural Revolution, Mao's attempt to purge Chinese society of supposed bourgeois elements and escalate his own cult of personality. The conferees seemed to be trying to outdo one another in their professions of love for their nation's leader.

On April 28, 1968, the last day of the 23-day gathering, a 5-year-old kindergartner was performing the "loyalty dance," as it was known. In front of the soldiers in the stadium stands, she skipped in place and sang:

No matter how close our parents are to us, they are
not as close as our relationship with Mao

How absurd. The girl certainly was lovely and eager to please, but the photojournalist found the excess of zeal discomforting. "They had to love him to the extreme."
In the cult of Mao, everyone was expected to perform the loyalty dance, from miners to office workers to toddlers to old ladies whose feet had been bound. "The movements were always toward the sky, that way you could show how respectful you were to Mao and everyone knew how to dance it."

Now not to worry, the Loyalty Dance is alive and well today with the Tea Party. Please join along with Sarah Palin and the Teabaggers so you too can follow along to the Tea Party Loyalty Dance!!

Dr. Laura Schlessinger Part Two

In 1998, admittedly upset that he was snubbed by Schlessinger at an event, former radio mentor Bill Ballance sold nude photos of Schlessinger to media outlet Internet Entertainment Group (IEG).
Schlessinger had posed for the photos while involved in a sexual relationship with Ballance in the 1970s. IEG purchased the photos and subsequently posted them on its website which was later leaked to the general public. Schlessinger initially denied that the photos were of her, but then claimed a copyright interest in them in court. Attempts to have the photos removed from various websites failed after a court ruling stated that IEG had legally acquired the rights to the material.
She later admitted that the photos were authentic, addressed the issue on her show calling Ballance a "mentor and friend", and said she was "mystified as to why this 80 year old man would do such a morally reprehensible thing." She claimed to have possessed "no moral authority" when the photos were taken, citing her age at the time of twenty-eight and a painful divorce as factors contributing to her voluntarily being photographed nude.
She added that she had undergone "profound changes over the course of my life, from atheist to observant Jew." The incident brought to light accusations that Schlessinger had been unfaithful in her first marriage, caused the breakdown of her second husband's marriage, cohabitated with him while unmarried, and intentionally conceived a child with him out of wedlock. Schlessinger had railed against infidelity, cohabitation, and intentional single parenthood on her show, but never addressed that these were part of her personal life experience. Schlessinger responded to these criticisms saying: “A hypocrite is someone who says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” “A TEACHER is someone who says, “Do as I say, not as I did.” As we all can see such a big difference in word play that we have to not hold her for any hypocrisy.


Now my only hope is we don't find and of these with Rush Limbaugh in them!!

Laura Schlessinger Says Is Leaving Radio

As the conservative radio talk show host Dr. Lara Schlessinger, a family values advocating no sex until marriage but who had premarital sex herself, touted marriage fidelity by admonishing others but faced allegations of adultery herself, and railed about the decline of morality but saw nude pictures of herself published on the Internet; has, like many self-styled advice experts, a well-documented history of hypocrisy.

Schlessinger leapt past the bounds of typical talk radio phoniness into uncharted levels of self-delusion and hubris by her decision to hurl the N-word at a black caller nearly a dozen times on her show last week.

She even went on to justify her egregious act by stating that she wanted “to regain her First Amendment rights!" Yes it is her right and should not be admonished for hurling the “N” word on her talk show.

The conservative talk show hosts needs to realize “The First Amendment” doesn't guarantee speech without consequence, just speech without undue government intervention. Indeed, protesters' work persuading advertisers to abandon shows with questionable content may be the height of democracy; using the free market to register public protest in ways conservatives has practiced for decades.

Now, after so many years advising callers to take responsibility for their lives, it is curious to hear Schlessinger accept none for herself. The "Advice Guru" said she would be ending her three decade radio and not renew her contract and this isn't the first time she's ducked criticism by ducking out.

Bottom line, no matter how much she points fingers elsewhere, it should be clear: Schlessinger's biggest victimizer stares back at her from the mirror, every day.

Writer Anne Rice: “Today I Quit Being A Christian”

Bestselling author, Anne Rice, officially decided she had had enough. "For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else." "And frankly," she continues, "after doing it, I felt sane for the first time in a very long while."

Rice says although there were "last straws," there was no one event that caused her to reject organized religion. "This is something that had been going on really almost from the beginning. There were signs that the public face of Catholicism and the public face of Christianity were things that I found very, very difficult to accept."

Rice says she tried her best to ignore the facets of Christianity she didn't support and concentrate on the ones she did. As time wore on, though, and as Rice continued to live and study as a Christian, "more and more social issues began to impinge on me."

Rice says the priest child molestation scandals and cover-up, the Pope going to Africa denouncing the use of condoms, but the final straw was when she realized the lengths that the church would go to prevent same-sex marriage. "I didn't anticipate at the beginning that the U.S. bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage," she says. "That they were actually going to donate money to defeat the civil rights of homosexuals in the secular society."

"I felt an intense pressure. I am a person who grew up with the saying that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, and I believe that statement."