QUESTION: RE: ….& Coming Barter System.
So, are you suggesting that we may see a shift to Silver by private individuals as the only way to sidestep Government stupidity, or will it be even worse, like trading whiskey for toilet paper??
TWE
ANSWER: Assuming government attempts to follow the IMF’s advice and create cryptocurrencies to replace paper money, then the only alternative will be the barter system. To make this clear, the likelihood of the USA following this route is a last resort. It will NOT be the first, but the last. We will see this in Europe before we will ever see it in the USA.
This cannot be a question that is answered based upon OPINION, for we all have one. The only rational way to approach that question is to look at history and see how people responded to similar but not identical positions. What comes to mind in Japan. Each new emperor devalued the money issued his own coins worth 10x that of the coins of the previous emperor. People resorted to bags of rice and they used the coins of China. Everyone refused to use Japanese coins. The result was that Japan LOST the right to issue coins at all for 600 years.
Moving to a cryptocurrency to stop the underground economy from using paper money will simply switch it to foreign currency (dollars in Europe) or something commodity based. In federal prisons, when they banned smoking back in 2004, packs of mackerel industry became the prison currency. Everyone operated an internal economy. They used cigarettes as their currency of choice to purchase anything from food and home-brewed prison hooch. They also used books of stamps. Prisoners could ship books of stamps out and they could resell them at a discount. Mackerel became the small change at about $1 a pack. There are fully developed economies within prisons. Someone skilled at drawing would make cards for holidays, while others were good at a trades tailoring to fix your clothing. Others would take a scarf and turn it into a warm knitted hat.
Once you eliminate the freedom that paper money provides, the government may believe it will get 100% of every tax it ever dreamed of but the underground economy will flip to barter. As far as silver is concerned, I would prefer silver coins that are recognizable to the average person. Offering bars of silver would be at a discount, for it will require knowledge and testing.
The government is using Civil Asset Forfeiture to simply rob people. The numbers are in for Texas along. The police department stole $50 million in confiscations during 2017 when nobody was ever charged with a crime. They hat to publish these numbers because they know they are doing something unethical. They seize property and it is the PROPERTY that is PRESUMED to be guilty. The burden is on you to get a lawyer and pay all the expenses to try to get your property back. You will not be reimbursed for the legal fees so they know they just get away with it. This is part of the financial crisis we are in that will ultimately lead to revolution and the collapse of the United States probably in the aftermath of 2032.
This is EXACTLY how Rome fell. When the army could not be paid, they began sacking their own cities under the pretense that they supported a political opponent. Here is a Colonial paper currency issued by Georgia in 1779 and it boldly states that it is BACKED by their confiscation of all assets of anyone who supported the king. We have been there many times before.
There is a major battle going on in Southern California as all the people who have come across the border but have no place live. All the posturing against Trump calling him a racist for wanting to put up a wall to stop the influx of illegal aliens and drugs, the real test will be to see just how the Democrats will handle reality in California. The massive increase in transient encampments that now are right in front of million dollar homes in Venice beach will be a real litmus test for this liberalism that fails to respect that a host of other laws prevent employers from hiring illegal aliens to begin with. They advocate letting them in, but then fail to grasp how do they earn an income and pay taxes no less join Obamacare.
Many see this crisis as a true testof Democratic Liberalism. How will California deal with the issue when it is right in your face? It is easy to say let them in and you are being harsh. But when they start camping out next to your home and your children need to walk pass them, the issue becomes personal.
The total mismanagement and incompetence of government is just beyond description. The new California Governor Gavin Newsom presented his first state budget during a news conference, last week on January 10th, 2019. While he won bashing Trump over the illegal aliens because he care so much for families, he could care less about how much of a burden the state imposes upon families. His new proposal to tax drinking water will impact everyone – not the rich they always point to. He is claiming to tax water to help the poor afford water. His the newly-released budge calls for the creation of a “safe and affordable drinking water fund” that would “enable the State Water Resources Control Board to assist communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, in paying for the short-term and long-term costs of obtaining access to safe and affordable drinking water.”
It’s like labeling the most abusive taking of our rights the “Patriot Act” whenever you need to hide the real abuse. He is calling the tax as suddenly necessary to ensure “safe” water. They paid for a study to show that 6 million Californians rely on water providers that violated state standards at some point in the last six years. The area impacted was Southern San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Hey, that’s a great excuse to tax the entire state.
Sources behind the curtain have states deeply concerned because they can see we are headed into a recession. This leg down should be harder moving into 2020. The whispers behind the curtain fear that revenues will decline sharply as costs will rise further with pensions for state employees. Nobody is yet willing to step up and say this system is collapsing and it is unsustainable long-term. They are only interested in raising taxes just to get by for the year. Newsom is concerned that revenue could drop $25 billion in 2019-2020. They are simply looking for other excuses to raise taxes.
Ironically, California is the fourth-largest oil producing state. Before he left office, former Governor Jerry Brown signed a mandate that the state obtain all of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2045. That in itself was a very, very big deal. However, Brown also issued an executive order calling for the entire California economy to become carbon-neutral by 2045. The sheer cost of that where California is already the highest taxed state will most likely push its taxes perhaps even beyond France. This will become a major test for those cheering to stop Climate Change. It was precisely the Global Warming taxes that began the French protests of the Yellow Vests.
Those in government NEVER look at what they are doing to society. They believe they possess the Divine Right of Kings to do whatever they please without regard for the people.
If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!
If you ask in Europe are people happy with the Euro, you will generally get a response of about 80% in favor. Even if you ask are people happy to be part of the EU, the majority over 90% will say yes. The curious thing is they buy this propaganda that on the surface Europe is all one big happy family. However, when it comes to consolidating the debts of Europe, you barely get a 10% approval rating. So on the one hand, Europe is one big happy family, but they are not about to support the cousin or brother-in-law who they regard as a derelict spendthrift who always squanders his money on wine, women, and song. So yes, he is a family member, but you keep him at a distance and tolerate him at obligatory family weddings and funerals.
There it is – the Euro Crisis. The cultural disparity will never be overcome. The proposals being whispered behind the curtain now is for Brussels to issue Euro bonds and then distribute that money to the derelicts in the family. They have realized that the failure of one may bring the whole family down. Because there is this monumental resistance toward assuming the debts of the derelict brother-in-law, it is best to leave him with his debt and hand him charity so he does not starve.
QUESTION: Marty you recently said that “the entire problem of lowering interest rates to ‘stimulate’ the economy demonstrates that central banks cannot really manage anything.” Is this statement really true?
BG
ANSWER: Absolutely. There is a basic presumption in all human activity that somehow we possess the power to do anything be it end Global Warming or managing the economy. Yet neither has ever been accomplished. We assume that we MUST do something even if there is nothing we can actually do to reverse the trend. It is like what I just wrote about the Plunge Protection Team. Do you realize that every empire, nation, and city-state at some point realizes the end is near, yet they cannot prevent their own demise any more than we can prevent our own death.
“The Rediscovery of the Business Cycle – is a sign of the times. Not much more than a decade ago, in what now seems a more innocent age, the ‘New Economics’ had become orthodoxy. Its basic tenet, repeated in similar words in speech after speech, in article after article, was described by one of its leaders as ‘the conviction that business cycles were not inevitable, that government policy could and should keep the economy close to a path of steady real growth at a constant target rate of unemployment.’
Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker in his Rediscovery of the Business Cycle clearly stated the theory of managing the economy with Keynesian tools failed. When he tried sending interest rates cascading higher into 1981, he really altered the economy forever. There was a capo on interest rates known as the Usury Laws. On April 1st, 1980, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 became effective. This Act put in place federal usury law applicable to certain credit transactions and preempted any state usury laws that would apply to these credit transactions. In order to raise interest rates to fight inflation, the laws that protected people from excessive interest rates known as Usury limitations was repealed so the Fed could raise rates to 14%. As always, they never put back any changes to regulations. That is the reason why credit cards could charge even 25% rates of interest.
This is just one example of what I call the Paradox of Solution. Every time the government has impose a solution, they create the cause of the next crisis. When Volcker raised the interest rates to 14% in 1981, he nearly tripled the national debt over the next decade. Government is simply incapable of actually managing anything. Nevertheless, because they usurp power from the people, they believe that they are in control and MUST do something regardless of the consequences. The Quantitative Easing by the ECB has created a nightmare in Europe for now where Volcker caused the national debt to explode with excessively high interest rates, we face the opposite today where governments are addicted to excessively low interest rates and are unable to maintain this level of spending if rates even returned to 8%.
Even Larry Summers which was Secretary of the US Treasury that he was incapable of forecasting the future economic trends. If they cannot forecast the trend, then they act blindly in their attempt to manage the economy. It was Larry Summers who will not ever admit a mistake. He is the father of negative interest rates and now that this tactic has failed, he blames what he calls the ZERO boundary where people will take their money out of banks and hoard it at home in a safe. He next solution? Eliminate all paper money and move to cryptocurrency issued by the government to enforce negative interest rates.
Then we have the legislative branches who spend whatever they need and look to the central banks to manage the inflation they themselves create. They take no responsibility for their own actions. This places the central bank between a rock and a hard place. Trump was bashing the Fed over its rate hike while he fails to understand the crisis we are in thanks to Larry Summers. The Fed has to choose between Fiscal Policy and its own monetary policy or Fed Policy. It raises rates to deal with the crisis of excessively low interest rates and then the budget deficit increases as the cost to keep rolling the debt grows exponentially.
This is what I mean by my statement that central banks cannot really manage anything. They must pretend to be in control, but are simply sitting in the back seat of a taxi with a kangaroo driving
Is four minutes the new eternity? That’s what many think when it comes to internet video, but has the average attention span fallen so far that it’s become nearly impossible to train the next generation of engineers? The men of Right Angle examine a phenomenon that poses a threat to our entire educational system. Right Angle is a production of the Members who contribute their own money, voluntarily, to be citizen-producers at http://BillWhittle.space/subscribe
In October 2015 the DOJ announced it was dropping the investigation into the IRS, Lois Lerner, and the unlawful sharing of taxpayer data in the IRS targeting investigation surrounding True The Vote et al.
As a direct consequence of the DOJ decision, congressional inquiry into the IRS targeting matter seemingly dropped from the radar.
However, if you draw a line from the original intent of the entire enterprise, the post-2010 mid-term “shellacking”/”secret research project“, forward to the 2016 election cycle an interested observer might still be left asking:
“why did the IRS, through Lois Lerner, deliver the 1+ million pages of tax filings, to include the entire donor list of Tea Party and patriot groups, through 21 CD-ROMs and not by electronic data transfer. Information that was specifically sent to Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice”?
This is an obvious question which, despite the numerous congressional hearings on the matter, was never asked – nor answered.
The entire scheme is riddled with complexity; almost too complex for the average person to understand, and seriously difficult to summarize. However, when you boil it down here’s the essential components that are no longer suspicion or supposition, but factually provable:
As a result of a trillion dollar stimulus filled with scheme and graft; and as a result of Obamacare being similarly schemed in backroom deals and late night votes; President Obama was “shellacked” in the November 2010 election.
The White House didn’t see the defeat a flawed policy issue; rather as the entrenched ideologues they are, they saw the SCOTUS case “citizens united” as the principle tool used by the White House opponents to organize and fund political movements, ie. the tea party.
The Obama Team response to the 2010 Shellacking was to use the Dept. of Justice (AG Eric Holder) to weaponize the IRS and go after groups -like Tea Party Groups- organized under the financial umbrella of 501(c)(4) donation structuring.
Years later, when the scheme was discovered – the White House denied knowledge (“not even a smidgen of corruption”), the DOJ feigned ignorance, and the IRS began working overtime trying to hide the construct of the prior communication, planning and strategy.
The head of IRS tax exempt division, Louis Lerner, pled the Fifth.
Obama’s Chief of Staff Jack Lew was made Treasury Secretary (IRS is sub division of Treasury Dept.) where he was/is able to continue hiding information.
And Eric Holder constructed a team of DOJ lawyers to isolate, hide and manipulate the trail of evidence within the DOJ.
Just before the IRS targeting scheme was fully discovered/comprehended, and seemingly overlooked by any curious media enterprise, in February 2013 representative Maxine Waters said:
“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.” (link)
Loose Lips Sink UniParty Scheme Ships
Against, the backdrop of new information which proves the UniParty, both dems and republicans, benefitted from the targeting of the Tea Party and oppositional forces; and with the full comprehension that Mitch McConnell and the republican leadership organized a post Citizens United strategy to work around their financial dependency on the electorate via Super-PACs; aren’t you just a little bit curious what the purpose was to assemble a data-base or “Secret Research Project“?
Lois Lerner’s and other IRS officials’ concerns about how to handle these donor lists came on the heels of an advisory from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to her and other IRS officials in late March 2012 of “an audit we plan to conductof the IRS’s process for reviewing applications for tax exemption by potential section 501(c)(4), 501(c)(5), and 501(c)(6) organizations.”
March 2012 “audit we plan to conduct” was the IG notification for a pending investigation of IRS. Specifically of their handling of Conservative Groups filing applications and status.
We all know the result of that investigation was a finding the IRS was indeed targeting conservative groups – hence the IRS scandal erupted in the headlines.
However, far more troubling were later discoveries into the internal communications which suggested much more nefarious activity regarding the assembly of secret lists, the “Secret Research Project”.
An undertaking by both the Obama Administration and the DOJ together with the IRS began to surface.
The American Center for Law and Justice put it thusly: We know the IRS unconstitutionally targeted conservative groups. We know they illegally demanded, obtained, and held the donor lists of these conservative organizations. Now we learn that in 2012, the height of the targeting, the IRS was involved in a “secret research project” with this confidential, illegally obtained donor information.
That’s more than a big deal. It’s potentially criminal.
The very fact that the IRS was using the phrase “secret research project” should give every American pause. But the fact that this project was conducted as part of a well-orchestrated effort to target and silence conservative Americans is utterly disturbing.
Now, again, ask yourself: Why would Lois Lerner be delivering 21 CD-ROMs of data, lists of every American who joined arms with the Tea Party, to Eric Holder in the DOJ instead of just transferring that data over their internal computer systems?
WASHINGTON […] “After the Justice Department turned over the database to the Oversight Committee this month in response to a subpoena, the Justice Department says it was informed by IRS officials that it contains legally protected taxpayer information that should not have ever been sent to the FBI and it now plans to return the full database to the IRS,” a statement from the oversight committee said.
According to material obtained by the committee, the IRS sent the FBI “21 disksconstituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The latest left-wing popular cause celebre, an 18-year-old Saudi woman named Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, arrives in Toronto Canada seeking asylum.
Canadian Foreign Minister welcomes Rahaf and showcases the results of severe immersion in left-wing teenage popular political culture. The results are, well, creepy. Watch the trophy parade:
(Via Reuters) […] Qunun arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Saturday morning, wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the word Canada in red, and a blue cap with the logo of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has granted her refugee status. (read more)
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Then we have the legislative branches who spend whatever they need and look to the central banks to manage the inflation they themselves create. They take no responsibility for their own actions. This places the central bank between a rock and a hard place. Trump was bashing the Fed over its rate hike while he fails to understand the crisis we are in thanks to Larry Summers. The Fed has to choose between Fiscal Policy and its own monetary policy or Fed Policy. It raises rates to deal with the crisis of excessively low interest rates and then the budget deficit increases as the cost to keep rolling the debt grows exponentially.
Centinel2012 