Thursday, October 28, 2010

Thursday Funnies

Wandering around the zerohedge website, I found a link to the blog of William Goss.

Mr. Goss has some forthright things to say about America.

They say a country gets the politicians it deserves or perhaps it deserves the politicians it gets. Whatever the order, America is next in line, and as we go to the polls in a few short days it’s incumbent upon a sleepy and befuddled electorate to at least ask ourselves, “What’s going on here?” Democrat or Republican, Elephant or Donkey, nothing much ever seems to change. Each party has shown it can add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt with little to show for it or move our military from one country to the next chasing phantoms instead of focusing on more serious problems back home. This isn’t a choice between chocolate and vanilla folks, it’s all rocky road: a few marshmallows to get you excited before the election, but with a lot of nuts to ruin the aftermath.

Each party’s campaign tactics remind me of airport terminals pre-9/11 when solicitors only yards apart would compete for the attention and dollars of travelers. “Save the Whales,” one would demand, while the other would pose as its evil twin – “Eat Whale Blubber,” the makeshift sign would read. It didn’t matter which slogan grabbed you, the end of the day’s results always produced a pot of money for them and the whales were neither saved nor eaten. American politics resemble an airline terminal with a huckster’s bowl waiting to be filled every two years.

And the paramount problem is not that we contribute so willingly or even so cluelessly, but that there are only two bowls to choose from. Thomas Friedman, the respected author of The World Is Flat, and a weekly New York Times Op-Ed author, recently suggested “ripping open this two-party duopoly and having it challenged by a serious third party” unencumbered by special interest megabucks. “We basically have two bankrupt parties, bankrupting the country,” was the explicit sentiment of his article, and I couldn’t agree more – whales or no whales. Was it relevant in 2004 that John Kerry was or was not an admirable “swift boat” commander? Will the absence of a mosque within several hundred yards of Ground Zero solve our deficit crisis? Is Christine O’Donnell really a witch? Did Meg Whitman employ an illegal maid? Who cares! We are being conned, folks; Democrats and Republicans alike. What have you really heard from either party that addresses America’s future instead of its prurient overnight fascination with scandal? Shame on them and of course, shame on us. We’re getting what we deserve. Vote NO in November – no to both parties. Vote NO to a two-party system that trades promises for dollars and hope for power, and leaves the American people high and dry.



Y'see, I always knew I was a rich guy stuck in a poor guy's life.
Mr. Goss has obviously been struck with the lightning of righteousness and the thunderbolt of honesty.

Mr. Goss goes on to detail many truths obvious to those paying attention, but truths that are all but ignored by our current media ho-bags. Rather than just steal it all, I advise you to visit & read it for yourself.

The first 10 paragraphs will rouse your self righteous fury and urge you to "VOTE THE BUMS OUT" in our upcoming election.

Yeehah!

If you seek to keep the indignation alive though, I'd recommend you skip the last two paragraphs, otherwise your patriotic parade of empowerment will wither like a bouffant hairdo in a pummeling rainstorm.

We will tell them this. Certain Turkeys receive a Thanksgiving pardon or they just run faster than others! We intend PIMCO to be one of the chosen gobblers. We haven’t been around for 35+ years and not figured out a way to avoid the November axe. We are a survivor and our clients are not going to be Turkeys on a platter. You may not be strutting around the barnyard as briskly as you used to – those near 10% annualized yields in stocks and bonds are a thing of the past – but you’re gonna be around next year, and then the next, and the next. Interest rates may be rock bottom, but there are other ways – what we call “safe spread” ways –to beat the axe without taking a lot of risk: developing/emerging market debt with higher yields and non-dollar denominations is one way; high quality global corporate bonds are another. Even U.S. Agency mortgages yielding 200 basis points more than those 1% Treasuries, qualify as “safe spreads.” While our “safe spread” terminology offers no guarantees, it is designed to let you sleep at night with less interest rate volatility. The Fed wants to buy, so come on, Ben Bernanke, show us your best and perhaps last moves on Wednesday next. You are doing what you have to do, and it may or may not work. But either way it will likely signify the end of a great 30-year bull market in bonds and the necessity for bond managers and, yes, equity managers to adjust to a new environment.

If a country gets the politicians it deserves, then the same can be said of an investor – you’re gonna get what you deserve. Vote No to Republican and Democratic turkeys on Tuesday and Yes to PIMCO on Wednesday. We hope to be your global investment authority for a new era of “SAFE spread” with lower interest rate duration and price risk, and still reasonably high potential returns. For us, and hopefully you, Turkey Day may have to be postponed indefinitely.



In other words, when "Disneyland" shuts down, and the "American Ponzi Scheme" unravels, those who invest with him will be safe as babes in their mother's arms.

Gee, I really really love when everything, even "da truth," turns out to be nothing more than a big angst ridden commercial.

Don't you?

14 comments:

ericswan said...

Yes to the poll shift. I particularily draw the conclusion that you are heading to that red white and blue spiral dance of deception not knowing which way the barber goes.

Morocco Bama said...

I like a lot of the information and analysis at Washington's Blog, and in fact have provided links to it several times over the past several months, but the latest post shows the proprietor's true colors, IMO. Tell me if it doesn't make you want to yak.....that fawning over the "Founding Fathers." Give me a break, already.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/10/founding-fathers-vision-of-prosperity.html

just_another_dick said...

My problem with "The Founding Fathers" talking point is simply that those who continually trot that canard out always act as if "The Founding Fathers" were some unified whole who shared all the same beliefs.

The W-Blog trots out Jefferson & Franklin by demonstrating their dislike for central banks, but they conveniently neglect Alexander Hamilton who vigorously pushed for a central bank, eventually achieving his goal after Franklin died.

Honest Abe is another anti-bank president who avoided the usurious interest rates attached to European loans by printing Greenbacks.
Lincoln probably took a bullet because he planned to continue using Greenbacks after the Civil War.

While it may not be provable, there is fairly persuasive evidence that John Wilkes Booth was a mercenary hired by Confederate Treasurer Judah Benjamin who was a close friend of Benjamin Disraeli, an intimate associate of the London Rothschilds.

Here's what The Times of London had to say about Lincoln's Greenback policy:

"If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world.
The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America.
That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

My point is that bankers have been manipulating shit since there were bankers, yet they always manage to maintain their dubious air of respectability.

They can toss as many politicians out of office as they want, but until folk are willing to man-up and look at the system itself, they're not going to change much.

ericswan said...

You might wonder what through the public off the trail of conspiracy when it comes to Booth. I have 3 or the 4 volumes of Carl Sandberg's "Abraham Lincoln" and "The War Years". Published in 1939 by Harcourt, Sandberg sifted through all pertinent documents to discover that Booth had his palms read by a gypsy who claimed that "he" would come to no good. Apparently, that was enough to tar and feather the man for the next 100 years.

Morocco Bama said...

Yes, Richard, it's treating the "Founding Fathers" monolithically, but there are also strong overtones of homage and worship associated with any discussion of the Oligarchs who set up this system of governance to protect their lofty status and vested interests. They weren't so very different from the European Aristocracy who looked down their noses at these crude American Oligarchs......the American Oligarchs merely wanted a Country Club of their own. In that, I believe they were all in agreement.

Yes, Honest Abe. How history has misinformed when it comes to Honest Abe. For example, and as you well know, Honest Abe considered Negroes to be inferior, and had no intention of freeing them prior to, and at the on-set of, the Civil War. Freeing the slaves did not enter into Lincoln's decision to engage in a war between the states. But the whitewashed history texts would have us believe that Abe was a noble and altruistic emancipator. He was hardly that.

What Lincoln did accomplish was a significant consolidation and centralization of power at the federal level and a substantial increase in the power of the executive. It paved the way for the Industrialists and Cattle Barons to use the state apparatus to secure everything and anything under the sun from coast to coast....and in the end, allow the dastardly banks only one lever to manipulate in order to hold sway over an entire continent. Previously, the banks had to go state to state and convince, through any manner of artifice, the Oligarchs of the fruits of their deception. After Lincoln, diversity was no longer an option. Federal trumped State in almost every instance.

The Bankers couldn't have asked for anything better. Oh, you need to rebuild? Sure, we will give you a hand.....and we'll take your head in return.

Morocco Bama said...

Richard, you made the exact point I was going to make about GW's latest post in regards to fraud being to blame. It is a limited hang-out excuse, and I believe that blog is a limited hang-out.....just like RI is a limited hang-out. You can glean some useful information, but it must be taken with a grain of salt.

It's the System.....and that's exactly the conclusion they don't want you to draw, because if enough people do concomitantly, it's game over.

Morocco Bama said...

Here's an interesting link to an analysis about Lincoln and the Republicans. The Republicans are, and always have been a Big Government Activist Party, contrary to their crafted party line.

http://themoderatevoice.com/40247/lincolns-republicans-a-party-of-big-activist-government/

[T]he Republican Party was really born amidst hundreds of meetings across the North, to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to react to it, to figure out some way to politically resist it. That “hell of a storm” that Stephen Douglas had predicted, is exactly what happened, but he didn’t have any clue the direction or the ferocity of the political storm that this would cause…. What was born in that summer, and especially that fall, was the most rapid third-party political coalition movement in all of American history; and if you want a prototype for any possibility of that kind, any other time in our political history, this is it. The Republican Party, brand new–not six months old–will elect 100 people to the House of Representatives in the fall elections of 1854, and they will begin to draw together a remarkable coalition.

Morocco Bama said...

More from that link.

War enabled the Republicans to pass sweeping visionary legislation borne of a certain worldview, and that worldview…depended on an activist interventionist federal government, and that is exactly what the Republicans created, in part out of necessity of the war and in part out of the fact that they actually believed in it. And it’s going to bring about a great deal of constitutional innovation and economic experimentation. Here’s what they did. In finance, in agriculture, in taxes, in building railroads, and in emancipation–at least those five major categories–the Republican Party transformed the United States Federal Government.

They began by first selling war bonds. The Treasury needed money to fight the war… How are you going to produce all this money? They began selling bonds to banks and financiers. In 1862, about 500 million dollars in bonds were sold at six percent, payable in five years. Buy a bond, support the war… The whole idea here was economic nationalism, to invest the citizen in the fate of the Union by making them pay for it. And it was in 1862 that the Federal Government for the first time created the Greenback Dollar, the paper dollar, which actually revolutionized American currency. Financial markets went up and down during the war, depending on battlefield success or failure. But by 1863, they were financing a war, companies were making profits and the Federal Government could pay its bills. It worked. The total national debt of an annual two-and-a-half billion was absorbed by the general population, and it was celebrated as what the Republican Party called a people’s triumph….

[W]hat came out of this was a revolutionary set of legislation that only wartime could probably have produced; the Homestead Act in the West, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Morrill Act of 1862, which was the Land Grant College Act, which created agricultural colleges across the country, by federal money… And really, frankly to understand how Northerners, the Republican Party, Lincoln himself and at least the majority of those Union troops came to support emancipation, the freeing of black people, by federal authority, you need to see it in the context of all else that this Republican Party was doing through the Federal Government. They were using government now as the engine of great social experimentation and change; granted, so much of it out of necessity, some of it out of will.

just_another_dick said...

Shrub, I read a few articles last week, primarily about how Americans are "fed up" and ready to "kick the bums out," and a recurring mantra seemed to be that our problems stem from a few corrupt politicians. One guy said something like, "If we find politicians who run the country's finances as they'd run their home finances, everything will be better."

They then go on to explain that "questioning the system itself" seems, somehow, "unpatriotic."

Don't you love it?

I don't have much of a Founding Fathers fetish.

It's nice that they write flowery paragraphs about liberty, but one man's liberty is often a ball & chain for someone else.

I also have problems with the "leader/follower" meme that appears everywhere the media rears its ugly head.

When I hear it, I can't help wondering about the moment when leaders & followers morph into masters & slaves.

I've never really had much of a Lincoln fetish either.

I watched a bit of Stewart's rally today. All it seemed to prove is that "sane" Americans will mill about, mindlessly listening to famous people spew platitudes as long as there is celebrity entertainment.
I don't really see the point.
This is like activism without the action. I'm sure most will wander home feeling like they've done their part to change things, but it all looks as vacuous as Obama's Hope/Change presidential campaign.

ericswan said...

Shrub ..there is a paper in your Library of Congress called the "Stock Watering Act" 1862 which set aside all the trails for the purposes of watering stock and for public use. This act covers all the lands presently controlled by the BLM. We had a similar act of 1883 here in Canada eh. The point here is that trails were legislated to be road allowances. By 1889, all the trails throughout Western Canada were public which solved part of the problem our Native Indians were having staying on the reservation and ranchers that did not have wells or waterfront property could drive their herds to drink.

These surveys of trails have been lost here in the provinces. As a result, fences preclude public access. I'm thinking this is a Republican/Conservative agenda.

ericswan said...

Patrick Geryl (who has the 'How to Survive 2012" web site) was kind enough to send me the key dates to be watching for the Sun/Earth relationship going into 2012:

Cycles Left Sunquake Dates
10 Sunday, August 01, 2010
9 Monday, October 25, 2010
8 Tuesday, January 18, 2011
7 Thursday, April 14, 2011
6 Friday, July 08, 2011
5 Sunday, October 02, 2011
4 Monday, December 26, 2011
3 Wednesday, March 21, 2012
2 Thursday, June 14, 2012
1 Saturday, September 08, 2012
0 Sunday, December 02, 2012

So between Clif & Patrick running numbers, and with the Indonesia quake right about 'on schedule', the timing is close enough for home use, which means we will set the timer for around January 18th for the next round of shake & quake - that is, if this series is over...

---

I am just assuming you can connect the dots between these two stories, right?

Morocco Bama said...

Eric, as much as I've tried, I can't make the connection between the Stock Watering Act of 1862 and Geryl's (wasn't he a character in the Superman Story?) 2012 Tsunami hypothesis. Please help me out.

Morocco Bama said...

Richard, any conclusions on that WorldVision link I provided. I've been called a BP Shill on this site by some because I have questioned the assertion that BO and Venter have used the GOM Oil Spill to spray their synthetic bacteria.

http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/

I believe it is misinformation......meaning some facts cobbled together with innuendo and false extrapolations to create an unnecessarily alarmist analysis. There is much to criticize about the potential destructive implications of Venter and his creations and alliances, but I believe this alarmist approach serves to sully legitimate, and well-needed criticism.

just_another_dick said...

Interesting Shrub. When I initially read it I kept flashing to the videos that were released while the spill was underway. I think you know the ones I mean, where increasingly wild predictions of collapsing sea floors & hurricanes spreading toxic goo never actually came true.

I liked the idea of the story though.
For what it's worth, when I did a cursory search much later, all links mentioning BP Flu seemed to magically lead back to World Vision Portal.

Eric, Geryl should change his name to Noah, since he seems dead set on building his own Ark.

I wish him well.