Dates That Destroyed America

Chuck Baldwin
March 24, 2010

The decision by Congress to socialize medicine in the US ranks among the most draconian, most egregious, most horrific actions ever taken by the central government in Washington, D.C.
Passage of the so-called “health care reform” bill in the House of Representatives this past Sunday, March 21 (I won’t even address the inferred unconstitutionality of Congress doing business on the Lord’s Day. See Article. I. Section. 7. Paragraph. 2.) drove yet another stake into the heart of America. For all intents and purposes, it is the health of the United States that is in dire need of healing. In fact, the US has been on extended life-support for decades. With its condition being rendered critical, and absent major surgery, its days are numbered. The passage of this bill only serves to further weaken an already frail Constitution.

In fact, this one may prove to be the fatal blow. Lady Liberty may never recover.

The decision by Congress to socialize medicine in the US ranks among the most draconian, most egregious, most horrific actions ever taken by the central government in Washington, D.C. This bill rocks the principles of liberty and constitutional government to the core. It changes fundamental foundations; it repudiates historical principle. Oh! The same flag may fly on our flagpoles, the same monuments may grace our landscape, and the same National Anthem may be sung during our public ceremonies, but it is not the same America. The Congress of the United States has now officially turned America into a socialist state.

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the health care bill into law, and as such, this date–along with March 21–joins a list of dates that have each inflicted unconstitutional, socialistic, and sometimes even tyrannical action against the States United and have, therefore, contributed to the destruction of a free America.

April 9, 1865
This is the date when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Regardless of where one comes down on the subject of the Civil War, one fact is undeniable: Abraham Lincoln forever destroyed the Jeffersonian model of federalism in America. Ever since, virtually every battle that free men have fought for the principles of limited government, State sovereignty, etc., have all stemmed directly from Lincoln’s usurpation of power, which resulted in the subjugation and forced union of what used to be “Free and Independent States” (the Declaration of Independence). In fact, the philosophical battles being waged today regarding the recent health care debacle (and every other encroachment upon liberty and State power by the central government) have their roots in Lincoln’s tyranny.

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Paul B Farrell
Wall Street War Zone
March 12, 2010

Yes, Wall Street wins, again. Wall Street’s control America is a drama right out of a Scorsese film about the mafia and crime in New York. They bought off Chris Dodd, who’s capitulated to the darkside while “interviewing” for a million dollar job as a lobbyist. They bought off, President Obama. Turns out he’s no Luke Skywalker, no ”game-changer,” not even much of a Chicago politican. They spent $400 million to kill financial reforms in Congress, to make absolutely sure the American public gets screwed, again … and in the process, they are setting up the next collapse. The big one. The dotcom crash didn’t do it. The subprime credit meltdown didn’t do it. What will? Another, bigger event … a combo of the “Collapse of the American Empire,” plus the “Great Depression II.”
If financial reform ain’t dead, it’ll end up watered down to nothing. That was obvious in a recent Charlie Rose interview with financial reformer Elizabeth Warren in Bloomberg/BusinessWeek: Outrage and Financial Reform. Warren’s a Harvard Law School Professor chairing of the Congressional Oversight Panel. The panel was ”created in 2008 to monitor the Treasury’s bank bailout and to review the regulation of financial markets.” Wall Street hates any reform that would expose their insatiable greed fighting all financial reforms in America, especially the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). So Wall Street doesn’t like Warren much. Here are a few clips summarizing why she’s an Eliot Ness character they’d like to eliminate:

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Posted on 03/09/10 at 8:28am by Roger Nusbaum
The crew over at Wall Street Cheat Sheet posted a quick interview they conducted with Jim Rogers. There was one line in there that really resonated with me and was something new (to me anyway) in terms of his usual message. More like an addition to his usual message.

Interviewer Damien Hoffman asked Jim what countries he watches to make sure the Greece situation doesn’t get out of control. Jim gave an answer that was broader than the intent of the question in saying…

I’m trying to watch the whole world. We cannot be very successful investors if we don’t know what’s going on everywhere. All of a sudden you’ll see something like Iceland will show up and you’ll get killed because you didn’t know that Iceland even existed.

He went on to note that often events start in places no one pays attention to. If you have been reading this site for a while you know that I try to ‘watch the whole world’ and write about that some. In the past I’ve mentioned some countries that are off the beaten path and obviously I devote a fair bit of time on trying to learn about certain narrow market segments where I think value can be added either through performance or dampening volatility.

The potential portfolio benefit should be obvious. As one example the troubles in Latvia caught my eye early on (read about it either in the FT or in Jyske Bank’s research) and it became clear that Swedish banks were very heavily exposed to Latvia through loans made into the country. Part of Latvia’s trouble came from unrealistically trying to maintain a peg to the euro. But now it is possible that they pulled off an internal devaluation (A Fistful of Euros has had a post or two about this) but that remains to be seen.

Every holding in a portfolio is risks but often those risks are not obvious without casting a wider net in what you study. The Latvia story might have steered you away from the the risks in Swedish banks.

Speaking of casting a wider net John Hussman had some interesting comments this week on the extent to which you can count on investor myopia resulting in behavior that is ultimately self destructive. He notes “it is impossible to ignore the rise over that same period of widely-viewed financial programming that is equally riddled with cartoonish content that encourages short-term thinking and speculation” all but mentioning Jim Cramer by name.

I don’t watch Cramer or Fast Money (the afternoon version but I often see the 15 minute version during Power Lunch) but I can see where the shows might influence people to trade more frequently than is right for them. During that halftime report they go around the panel and call the close. I don’t know but I have to think that the people who would be inclined to speculate on what the stock market might do in the last couple of hours in its day have no interest in what the Fast Money people think will happen. I also doubt that too many people really need to buy puts if the stock goes down another $0.50.

I also wonder how many people “have” to trade a stock ahead of the earnings, based on the earnings or based on the conference call. There is nothing wrong with this sort of trading on its face but there are not too many individual for whom this sort of thing is suitable. There are plenty of people engaged in exactly this type of thing who do not realize it is unsuitable for them and that is a problem in the making.

Another form of myopia; I guarantee that stock Medivation (MDVN) that dropped from $40 down into the teens on bad news from the FDA wiped out some person somewhere who owned only that name fully margined. In a less dramatic example, the next time emerging market stocks or commodity stocks go down a whole bunch there will be people that learn the hard way they had way too much exposure compared to what they should have had.

His point, I think, is that people do not learn from the mistakes they make. Everyone makes mistakes, you don’t stop making mistakes but the repeating of the same mistakes hinders reaching the long term goal. Despite how obvious this should be, trust me when I tell you many folks lack the introspection to see this.

Washington’s Blog
March 5, 2010

Nobel Prize-winning wconomist Joseph Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz – former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a nobel-prize winner – said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is “corrupt” and undermines democracy.
Stiglitz said:
If we [i.e. the IMF] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.
Stiglitz pointed out that – if another country had presented a plan to reform its financial system, and included a regulatory regime that copied the makeup of the Federal Reserve system – “it would have been a big signal that something is wrong.”
Stiglitz stressed that the Fed banks have clear conflicts of interest, since the banks are largely governed by a board of directors that includes officers of the very banks they’re supposed to be overseeing:
So, these are the guys who appointed the guy who bailed them out … Is that a conflict of interest?
They would say, ‘no conflict of interest, we were just doing our job. But you have to look at the conflicts of interest”…
The reason you talk about governance is because in a democracy you want people to have confidence … This is a structure that will undermine confidence in a democracy.
Indeed, by all objective measures, the Fed has performed horribly (and see this).

As 6 congressmen wrote last November, there are at least 4 reasons to demand full transparency of the Federal Reserve, and a change in the Fed’s structure:

First … how effective a regulator can the Federal Reserve be if it is unwilling to strive for good public policy through its regulatory powers?
Second, there is an inherent conflict in the manner in which regional reserve branch presidents are selected – in that representatives of the member banks select the regional president. It seems counterproductive, yet the banking system has provided case after case of regulated entities selecting their own regulator.
Third, the Federal Reserve has continually resisted efforts to engage in discussion on structural and governance reform at the System. Most recently, Bloomberg reported yesterday that the Federal Reserve has rejected a White House request that [the Federal Reserve] conduct a public review of its structure and operations.
Despite a request from the administration that provided ample opportunity for the Federal Reserve to have input into its own reforms, the central bank has simply refused. It is because of this attitude that I argue that real financial regulatory reform cannot occur without an examination into the structure of this entity.
Fourth, and most importantly, the Federal Reserve has shown a repeated unwillingness to accept efforts to improve transparency for the System.

John Byrne
The Raw Story
March 4, 2010

The Pentagon confirmed late Tuesday that it is investigating the death of a 24-year-old Indiana Marine after he was shot to death in Afghanistan, allegedly by several US-paid private security contractors.
The contractors, according to a fellow Marine in Afghanistan who communicated with an investigative reporter in Chicago, were Afghanis who were found with “copious amounts of opium” and had been paid by the United States as guards.
“He was killed by American Hired Local National Contractors that were high on opium the morning of the 19th,” the ABC reporter quotes a friend and fellow colleague of Lance Corporal Joshua Birchfield as saying in an email message.
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Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
March 4, 2010
A week ago Ron Paul asked Ben Bernanke a series of questions, which the Chairman and pundits immediately dismissed as “bizarre” and an indication that the potential presidential candidate has finally lost it (among these was a very nuanced question whether or not the Fed is buying sovereign debt, something which Bernanke disclosed in 2002 is a distinct possibility and an action the Fed is permitted to do). Chief among these were queries arising from the work of U of T professor Robert Auerbach, and specifically his book “Deception and Abuse at the Fed” (not available on Kindle), which seek information on whether the Fed was involved in the Watergate scandal and, subsequently, in Iraqi weapons purchases.

Well, Paul may not be as kooky as people are trying to make him out to be. None other than “consumer protection advocate” Barney Frank has demanded that Bernanke do a full probe based on these allegations.
Bloomberg reports:
Representative Ron Paul asked questions about “inappropriate political interference” and “hidden transfers of resources” during a Feb. 24 hearing with Bernanke, and the allegations “must be fully investigated,” Frank said in a letter today to Bernanke and obtained by Bloomberg News.
Frank, 69, said the Fed must address the charges because “continued concern about political interference” with the Fed and “allegations about a lack of transparency.” Bernanke and other Fed officials are trying to fend off a measure offered by Paul, which passed the House in December, that would open the Fed to audits of interest-rate decisions.
“These specific allegations you’ve made I think are absolutely bizarre, and I have absolutely no knowledge of anything remotely like what you just described,” Bernanke told Paul, a Texas Republican who wrote the 2009 book “End the Fed,” during last week’s hearing.
Some more on Professor Auerbach’s background, which lends substantial credibility to his allegations:
Auerbach worked for Henry Gonzalez, a former chairman of the House committee who died in 2000 and investigated the sale of U.S. arms to Iraq in the 1980s, before the Gulf War. Gonzalez said the Fed and other agencies initially tried to block his probe, according to a 1992 New York Times article.
Fed bank examiners in Atlanta failed to note $5.5 billion being funneled to Iraq from a local branch of an Italian bank, Auerbach, a critic of the central bank and former congressional economist, said in his book.
“The Federal Reserve’s ability to manage monetary policy in an effective manner depends, in large part, on its reputation for independence and integrity,” Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in the letter. “A complete investigation of these charges is necessary to maintain both.”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, March 4, 2010

A glib 33 second propaganda ad produced by the Kentucky Department for Public Health portrays skeptics of the swine flu vaccine as raving lunatics, despite the fact that the head of the Council of Europe’s investigation into the 2009 outbreak labeled it “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century.”
The commercial, which is entitled ‘H1N1 Vaccine Myths,’ features a group of office workers spewing ridiculous theories about the swine flu vaccine that have never been embraced by any vaccine skeptic, in an attempt to build a classic straw man and smear people who question the necessity for taking the shot as unstable lunatics.

The actors in the ad debate whether the H1N1 vaccine was “made from platypus milk,” or whether it “makes you susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.”

The clip ends by another actor in the ad stating, “It was made from secret alien technology found on the moon.”

“Some folks believe anything,” states an assertive female voice, “The swine flu vaccine is safe, effective, and you still need it, learn more at Kentucky’s flu website, that way you can separate the fact from the fiction.”

Unfortunately, Kentucky health authorities have completely failed to separate the fact from the fiction during the course of their 33 second ad, because they attribute outlandish theories about the vaccine to skeptics who have never even uttered such things.

While the advertisement frames suspicion about the vaccine in the context of tin-foil hat wearing madness, in reality the swine flu pandemic has been denounced as a gargantuan hoax not by demented paranoid psychotics, but by the head of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, who as the chief of a major investigation into the H1N1 outbreak, labeled the case a “fake pandemic” manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

In a separate interview, Wodarg labeled the pandemic, “One of the greatest medical scandals of the century.”
Makers of the swine flu vaccine such as CSL Limited and GlaxoSmithKine saw their profit margin soar by 63 per cent and 30 per cent respectively on the back of swine flu fearmongering that was dutifully practiced in spades by the corporate media throughout 2009. Roche made a whopping 12 times the profit during the second quarter of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008 as a result of the scare.
As we highlighted at the time, the very vaccine inserts that were publicly available clearly stated that the shot could cause Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Vasculitis, Paralysis, Anaphylactic Shock And Death. The vaccines also contained mercury and squalene, which have been directly linked with autism and Gulf War syndrome respectively.

Concerns about such dangers grew to such an extent that the majority of Americans told a Fox News poll that they thought the vaccine was more risky than catching the actual swine flu virus. Separate polls showed that the majority of doctors, nurses and health workers in the UK refused to take the shot.

In November 2009, take up of the vaccine was so slow that the U.S. government was forced to appoint what the media ludicrously billed as an “independent” group of health advisors whose job it was to whitewash adverse reactions to the swine flu vaccine and “explain” them to the public as mere coincidence. The “independent” group was lead by Dr. Marie McCormick of the Harvard School of Public Health, who had spent the last 10 years whitewashing reports of a link between vaccines and autism.

Suspicions surrounding the safety of the vaccine were confirmed when it was revealed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and government ministers would be taking a shot that did “not contain disputed additives — contrary to the vaccine for the remainder of the population.”

This commercial represents a desperate last ditch effort on behalf of health authorities to try and shift the endless batches of unused H1N1 vaccines that still remain precisely because millions of Americans believed the lunatics who warned them about the dangers of the shot and refused to take it.

So if you really do think you “still need” the H1N1 shot after it has been completely exposed as an international scandal by one of the premiere investigatory bodies in Europe, then roll up your sleeve and knock yourself out, after all, it’s “safe” and “effective” according to the government, but apparently not “safe” and “effective” enough for the political class in major western countries to take the same injection that you’ll be getting.

Watch the commercial below.

Washington’s Blog
March 3, 2010
House majority leader Steny Hoyer – a close ally to President Obama – says the U.S. needs to raise taxes and cut spending .
As Agence France-Presse reports:
The United States must embrace a blend of tax increases and spending cuts to rein in its deficit or face a potentially crippling debt crisis like the one in Greece, a top US lawmaker warned Monday.
“It is enough to look across the Atlantic at Greece’s extreme economic crisis and understand: It can happen here. If we don’t change course, it will happen here,” said Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer…
“It seems to me that the only solution that can win the support of both parties is a balanced approach: one that cuts some spending and raises some revenue while avoiding extremes in either direction,” he said.
Of course, many others have warned of the massive debt overhand in the U.S. as well.
But why aren’t our government “leaders” talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?
And why aren’t any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? And see this.
And why aren’t they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants – which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) – and give it back to the states?
If we did these things, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.