Planning the Decline of America

Progressive Marxism, Conservatism Planning the Decline of America

Far be it from conservatives to gain pleasure in planning the decline of America. Many of us spent the past four years attempting our dead level best to inform the uninformed about an existential threat to the United States. More eloquently expressed by George Mason University Economics Professor Walter E. Williams, we’ve been actively engaged in “Pushing back the frontiers of ignorance and trying to sell [our] fellow man on the moral superiority of personal liberty and its main ingredient limited government.”

Not everyone reading this will consider themselves a conservative, although many are without realizing it. They may have questions: “Who are these ‘conservatives’ exactly? What is this so-called ‘conservatism’ that creates unfamiliar thought patterns in my brain? Why is it so maligned by the political left and right? How can they be connected?”

Distilled to its essence, conservatism could be thought of as a political movement to preserve the philosophical core and legal integrity of statutes set forth in our U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights; provisions through which God-given unalienable natural rights are enumerated; our rights, summarily expressed in our Declaration of Independence with seven words of unmistakable meaning and profound importance: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The political divide in America is self-evident. Career pundits claim conservatives are outnumbered; that moochers have overtaken producers as a percentage of those showing up at the polls and conservatives need to move left to compete for votes. Republican establishmentarians for decades promoted the indefensible position philosophical conservatism is a problem, while tip-toeing gingerly around the 850 pound gorilla standing in a corner: the looters, i.e., those within and around government connected to cozy networks of political players that personify a crony beltway culture and the legislative ruination of profligate spending they champion.

If a split between Americans paying/not paying federal income taxes has consolidated into a pro big-government bloc of non-payers - a demographic actively supporting government control over their lives counter-intuitive to founding principles - such a trend of waning republicanism would carry the greater weight of proof if located in flyover country rather than the blue metropolitan urban areas where cities grind out a slow suicide. Indications are abundant that a silent majority of Americans willfully reject vote-buying schemes resulting in “free” government goodies, subsidized slothful laziness, and culturally promoted behavior that is personally self-destructive and crippling to our civil society. Americans are still getting up and going to work even as their pay is cut, benefits canceled, hours reduced, part-time jobs taken as a matter of necessity, and with employment ever more tenuous. ShadowStats.com calculates that when factoring long term impact of 5.7 million workers discouraged enough to have given up seeking jobs or forced to work part time - especially those workers dropped from unemployment rolls after 52 weeks and no longer tabulated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics - the accurate unemployment rate is hovering around 22.8%. Hard-working, industrious self-starters animate the labor market and “make it happen” in our diminishing capitalist free enterprise economy - described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations as individuals “acting solely in their own self-interests” - and this same conservative silent majority will be the driving force that re-establishes the United States of America as founded after our inevitable economic implosion. Conservatism

Any political movement - especially one continuously attacked by synchronized front groups as is conservatism today - requires inspiration and enthusiasm if it is to survive. The bar for conservative leadership is higher since conservatism requires reason and morality as well as knowledge of history and philosophy to transmit the ideals, values, and principles it espouses. These motivational ingredients should radiate naturally from the conservative movement’s most qualified national leader: someone experienced and with a track record of success, courageous, genuinely moral, charismatic, well-informed, and articulate. An ability to coherently project a party message is key. Ideological liberalism - or progressivism, before Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R. made the label toxic - has public relations advantages over philosophical conservatism; its’ attraction is cultivated by appealing to one of mankind’s most pliant common denominators, long a behavioral trap throughout human history: Emotion.

Democrats typically build their base by enticing, cajoling, or manipulating audiences into experiencing individual volitional perception through feeling rather than reflection; a pitiful triumph of subjective emotionalism over reason, observation, logic, deduction, and provable verifiable history. A cabal of ruling class establishment Republicans sought to plant a similar banner of cultist demagogic appeal for decades, but their copycat approach has yet to produce an effective means of out-pandering Democrats.

With the exception of Governor Sarah Palin, conservatives haven’t had a candidate on the national political stage offering any type of honest conservative vision since Ronald Reagan held the presidency. Watching Republican leaders attempt to discuss philosophical conservatism is horrifying. They become stilted, if not readily seized up; deer in the oncoming headlights of mainstream media condemnation; as if merely uttering the words to illustrate basic conservative principles, contrasts, and solutions is tantamount to political malfeasance. Strangely they don’t have a problem speaking the language of progressivism, collectivism, and globalism…unless it’s what they believe. 2013 brings good news and bad news for the unsung silent majority of conservative Americans, many of whom are too busy trying to survive in our present economy to have much interest in making time for politics. If they happen to pause and reflect on political dissimilarities between Democrats and Republicans, they observe a distinction without a difference: good news in a sense, proving yet again the conservative silent majority is far more perceptive than often acknowledged. A lack of difference between parties circumscribes the norm in Washington, D.C.

If Governor Mitt Romney - the establishmentarian big-government Republican candidate for president - had been dedicated enough to boldly and vividly contrast himself to the vulnerable incumbent, he could well have motivated 407,000 additional conservatives to turn out in five key swing states: the presidency would now be his. Conservatives are justifiably disgusted with progressive-lite Republicans; many conservatives refuse to support any candidate unwilling to passionately fight for a return to our country as founded. Historically, politics has always been similar to trench warfare; not for the faint of heart. Only after gut-wrenching defeat did we learn Gov. Romney’s heart just wasn’t in it; at a minimum, his subservience to political correctness was more important than playing to win. It wouldn’t alter the inevitable, but a Romney presidency could have slowed our induced economic decline and bought time with which to realize and better prepare for the problems we must deal with in the not-so-distant future. Progressive Marxism

The bad news is Progressive Marxists have won for now; it appears their century-long quest to “collapse the system” - meaning free market capitalism and traditional western cultural values - is rapidly approaching a terminal velocity. Scholars with interests in late 19th and 20th century political, economic, and cultural history understand the how and the why of this deft and stealthy culture-war; its roots, motivations, machinations, evolution, and the ugly ruthlessness of its daily usurpation and consummation: the unrecognized face of old school tyranny in our modern civil society.

Author and conservative radio host Mark Levin makes the case in Ameritopia we are living in a post-constitutional republic, having jettisoned erstwhile philosophical genius and resolute moral courage of the founders and framers. Our government landscape reveals today a plenipotentiary political class of insiders and operators - along with their ruling class overlords - more closely resembling the type of royal English monarchy the founders fought against than elected representatives serving their constituents by promoting liberty and it’s main ingredient limited government.

It was brilliant strategy by the Frankfurt School disciples of Karl Marx to blend Marxism, the work of Sigmund Freud, and desirable tenets of the Progressive movement (influenced by Fabian Socialism; embraced among intellectuals and academics in the late 1800’s), bringing to fruition a documented fear expressed by our founders and framers; that our Constitutional Republic might be surreptitiously attacked from within, a possibility made feasible by virtue of the unique abundance of an essential God-given ideal; one that has facilitated America’s growth into the uniquely prosperous, generous, and most secure nation state known to exist on earth: Liberty.

Interesting as it is, knowing the historical particulars of Progressive Marxism isn’t necessary to measure the outcome of prolonged deconstructive efforts by these radical left statists, nor the degree to which they truly despise our form of government, as well as “We the People;” unsophisticated rubes unfit for self-determination. “We the People” have been judged incapable and incompetent by narcissistic ivory tower-dwellers; pseudo-intellectual charlatans hawking a self-anointed vision of some distant utopia they can neither define nor justify through historical example. Leading the Progressive Marxist vanguard of mobster-like radicals, flush with victory from a campaign alleged to have received significant sums of bundled Chicago-style illegal foreign contributions and widely believed to have conspired with Eric Holder and the D.O.J. to subvert election law - as well as allegedly participating in the most sweeping and sophisticated Chicago-style voter fraud ruse ever conducted - is King Barry: our constitution-wrecking usurper. The evidence is compelling enough for congress to initiate an investigation; not from in-house congressional committees, but through a special prosecutor from outside the everyday affairs of government. It would be prudent to also have special prosecutors investigate separately the Benghazi mission murders as well as the Fast and Furious scandal.

King Barry has received plenty of help from like-minded ideological sympathizers and crony’s in facilitating his quest of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as he once promised us. Yet again history is critical to understanding King Barry by providing insights into his personal past, in addition to the behavior and beliefs of those influencing, guiding, and ultimately molding his lifelong ideological convictions. The Decline of America

King Barry has been aided and abetted by efforts from Andy Stern, Rich Trumka, and globalist union bosses; from George Soros, Maurice Strong, Khalid al-Mansour, Nadhmi Auchi and his Chicago proxy Tony Rezko; from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former U.S. Illinois Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; from Valerie Jarrett, William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, David Axelrod, Cass Sunstein and other Hyde Park radicals, from Chicago residents Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrahkan, from John Corzine and Wall Street’s crony capitalists, from mainstream media and Democrat loyalists, along with a coterie of compliant Republican political players working against a conservative electorate without compunction to steer capital markets and individual moral consciousnesses away from traditional American ideals, values, and principles, our Declaration and Constitution, and the Rule of Law.

Regretfully, at this late date the culmination of counter-revolutionary inertia is unstoppable. Progressive Marxists will win the objective they fought for during a century of subterfuge to collapse the system, but they will not win the war against liberty in our sovereign nation. Conservatives in the U.S. cherish liberty; many of whom fight now for a return to liberty as once was known and lived in America; drawing inspiration from the words of Founder Patrick Henry, one of the earlier champions of republicanism and the American Revolution: “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”

Much pain will be incurred, suffering experienced, and damage inflicted upon civil society before we “bottom out.” Eventually, the great traditional American traits reflected in the character of our founders and framers - unbridled determination, hard work, self-sufficiency and self-discipline, the moral ethic of personal responsibility along with a reverent appreciation of faith - will prevail. Americans have been led astray, but we do not lack for courage. We will again re-establish limited government and ordered liberty as defined in our U.S. Constitution.

Daniel Greenfield unravels the cumulative effects and lasting power of liberty on individuals and society in America with his article Death and Taxes (FrontPageMag.com -1/2/13) via a letter from Benjamin Franklin to his old friend - French scholar and physicist Jean-Baptiste Leroy - during the late 1780’s as the French Revolution wreaked havoc; outbursts of mob rule directed at “monopolizers” - and use of the guillotines - were commonplace: “Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” Franklin enquired, before going on to a brief mention of affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”

Death and taxes are the secret heart of government. They are the secret heart of all power, from the playground bully offering a choice between your lunch money or a knuckle sandwich, to the government bully offering a sophisticated legalistic version of the same. The American way of life was not made for kings or revolutionaries, for grand systems and tremendous tyrannies. It was made for the people, for the silent majority that seeks only to keep what it has, rather than steal from others, and when the mobs have moved on, it is the people who will restore America. This is our present station politically, economically, and culturally in America today; our government is a “mob” engaged in tyrannical behavior, yet one that will be outlasted by everyday conservative patriots: the silent majority. A New Beginning

Conservatives will forever fight to protect our founding documents; we will enlist others in our quest for a return to personal liberty, limited government, free markets, and the Rule of Law. We will legally engage - and rightly so - the enemies of our country each day as if the very future of our Constitutional Republic depends on it, but in reality our dedication to this daily fight will not alter a predestined economic calamity few are willing to comprehend or accept. As with the Laws of Physics, there exists as well Laws of Economics.

Elected politicians and appointed high officials in government are unprincipled, self-serving and corrupt. They have embraced cronyism and the cesspool of beltway culture, doing the expedient to further their careers. The system of enumerated powers and co-equal branches of government established at our founding has morphed into a crushing Leviathan; a plundering, insatiable, gigantic beast, ultimately dysfunctional and broken yet ever-expanding.

Our best strategy to effectively reduce the coming duration of pain and suffering - to minimize what’s in front of us - is for patriotic Americans to accept the outcome of our current economic trajectory and prepare to contend with what must eventually unfold by investing of ourselves in similar planning as have the Progressive Marxists: not to forgo our fight against tyranny today, but to plan also for a reality transcendent of party loyalties, political posturing and deceit.

The difference of attitude between Progressive Marxist counter-revolutionaries and patriotic, God-fearing Americans comprising the silent majority is one of moral clarity: they’ve been planning the decline of America for decades as a means of destroying our way of life; patriots should be planning for the decline of America in order to save it. Our United States has launched itself beyond the cliff by every significant measure; enough of us have acted over time as we’ve been conditioned, yielding the precise results sought through long-term inculcation. As we gain a new awareness of the greater challenges ahead, is it not reasonable to imagine we are more than capable of strategically out-planning a misguided - albeit crafty - collection of of arrogant, ideological, America-hating, anti-capitalist thugs?

It is a bitter pill to swallow. Most of us do not naturally gravitate towards steady-state discomfort, and have been conditioned through pampered lifestyles to react with avoidance and denial when unpleasant realities interrupt our pursuit of instant gratification. Unlike our forefathers, we display behavioral characteristics of a hyper-accelerated, pleasure-centric, impatient, often frantic and frequently frustrated society; one far more interested in exploring the equivocation of moral relativism than moral absolutism based on Judea-Christian values and traditions. Within the panacea of political correctness there are no moral absolutes; merely varying degrees or justifications of relativistic relationships inevitably reinforcing Progressive Marxist goals: we’re exhorted to do as they say, not as they do.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us be honest: we aren’t without blame in allowing the social decay resulting in our present sticky wicket. Politics is life and history matters; far too many of us have been negligent in developing civic curiosity and guilty of turning a blind eye to history. We’ve been herded as sheep to the slaughter by media sycophants; subservient to cultural conditioning by political correctness, critical theory, debasement of morality, sexual vagary, identity politics, social justice, gender and ethnic studies, and other Progressive Marxist methodologies designed to create culture rot, destroy the family structure, and to affect the planned decline of America. Comprehending the advent of political, economic, and cultural conditions leading directly to the presence of physical danger yet refusing to take reasonable action beforehand is reckless and irresponsible; morally far worse if children, the elderly or infirm are involved and counting on being cared for and protected. Since history seems to have a way of repeating, perhaps the most important lesson to remember is comprised in the Boy Scout’s motto: Be Prepared. Evidence and Review

1. Our federal government is a large scale version of the Chicago mob, run by a clique of Progressive Marxist Chicago radicals intent on collapsing the system from within. The counter-revolutionaries have become wealthy in the process - via inside connections, criminal corporatism, crony capitalism and corrupt dealing - thus insulating themselves as much as possible from the coming hard times. Planning the decline of America necessitated a skillful subversiveness and long-term conniving to implement our transformation; tugging against and finally unmooring us from our constitutional founding. These radicals cast a different shadow from corrupt politicians; clever ideological misfits, they are not distracted: quite the contrary, they are remarkably dedicated. They well know what’s coming - having engineered it - and look after their own. The American people are marks, and must look after themselves.

2. Our government is - and has been for years - corrupt, broken, and dysfunctional; cronyism is the norm inside Washington D.C. Politicians no longer run for office seeking to serve, but to obtain a means of gaming the system. What was once a civic-minded temporary public service stint is now a career destination. The political culture of cronyism among beltway players continually seeks stasis: nobody gaming the system will allow the applecart to be upset without fighting back: thus Governor Sarah Palin was - and continues to be - attacked shamelessly from both left and right, as she represents the most obvious threat to meaningful reform of the rigged game being played in D.C. and the northeast corridor. Nobody has a similar record of morality, courage, and integrity. As Governor of Alaska, she took on both corrupt political parties and the powerful state oil lobby. She restored the trust of fellow Alaskans in state government, thus illustrating through real reform what is possible with principled leadership.

3. Our tax code exceeds 71,000 pages and benefits corporations and other groups with vested special interests, influential political class operatives, and their ruling class overlords. These beneficiaries of legislative avarice have the money, power, and influence for active participation in the cronyism game; they’ve consistently stacked the IRS deck in their favor at taxpayer expense. Complexity and voluminousness of our tax code continue to increase. After many years of Republicans promising term limits to reduce the allure for career-minded politicians, legislation has not made it to the House floor; we still do not have term limits, nor will we have them anytime soon. Such legislation has the same probability of passage as does a flat tax or - far preferably - the FairTax: either one of which would do enormous good for all individuals, regardless of their income level. The U.S. was ranked in 2012 on the Index of Economic Freedom in 10th place globally. U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest among G-20 nations. Taxes the IRS collects are built into the price structures of goods by corporations as costs of doing business, hence paid for in full by the taxpaying public consumer when they purchase a retail product. This bureaucratic IRS shell game - among so many others - extorts billions of dollars in administrative expense, lost time, productivity and work, crippling economic growth with burdensome regulations as corporations outsource jobs to more business-friendly countries.

4. Politicians from both parties manipulate the on-going scam of baseline budgeting, playing the same tired bait and switch numbers game to “bring home the pork” and expand the size of government. Political pork rules the day and will continue to do so, a perfect representation of the beltway culture. We have today a one-party system. With the exception of Gov. Palin, there has been no consistent moral distinction in leadership between Republicans and Democrats since Ronald Reagan’s presidency; no one else on our national political stage resolutely standing in the breach and actually fighting back against an entrenched and hopelessly corrupt establishmentarian status qua.

5. King Barry increased purported U.S. discretionary budget debt by six trillion dollars. He will continue this same predictable pattern of destructive spending since bankrupting America is part of his mission, as it is part of George Soros’ mission. It is manifestly naive or preposterously disingenuous to suggest King Barry is a nice guy who loves America but doesn’t understand economics; that he’s trying to do the right thing but is simply in over his head. Our U.S. credit rating has already been downgraded, and it will experience further downgrade as King Barry plans his work and works his plan. The United States is quite obviously broke. After America author Mark Steyn points out we are literally the most broke nation in all of world history. U.S. debt is discussed as equal to our G.D.P., but it’s much worse; the $16 trillion figure doesn’t include unfunded liabilities Medicare and Social Security ($70 trillion). It should be noted as well that our level of federal welfare spending over the next decade is projected to increase 80%.

6. The Fed is now “expanding the money supply” - i.e., printing dollars from thin air - using nothing more powerful than a glyph on their computer screen; a superficial strategy of currency devaluation. Dr. Walter E. Williams once pointed out there may have been a time when our federal debt was low enough to lend the slimmest of credence to repudiation via debasing the currency, but not for decades. Current Fed monetary policy is highly destructive and the outcome is certain: climbing inflation and eventual collapse of the dollar.

7. Our U.S. government is a poor a credit risk. Treasury securities necessary to finance our ever-increasing debt no longer have ready appeal for investors we’ve counted on to purchase them in the past; the Fed purchases many of these debt instruments from the Treasury with electronic credits. The banks receiving the credits then leverage them as reserves to make additional credit loans - loans far exceeding face value of the credit “deposits” - thus an expansion of the money supply; a questionable practice known as fractional reserve banking. Many observers have concluded that fractional reserve banking inevitably creates a fiscal condition of ever-decreasing liquidity. In short, we pay our credit card debt with more credit cards while interest accrues, as the Fed continues a monetary policy that squelches return rates for government bond holders. Interest rates are being kept low as part of the Fed’s “easy money” policies, but there is no scenario whereby these interest rates remain low in perpetuity. Chris Martenson, guest writer at Zerohedge.com (9/19/2012), made the following pithy observation about debt in his article The Trouble With Printing Money:

“In the real world your income and expenditures have to eventually balance, and the only question is whether this is accomplished through diligence or catastrophe. The prior forty years were an admirably sustained departure from reality, but like all teenage road trips fueled with a pilfered credit card, the practices of those times were unsustainable and destined to end. Hopefully by widening up our lens a little bit, we can more easily appreciate that instead of being ‘normal’, the vast expansion of debt was actually quite abnormal, and therefore attempts to resuscitate its prior trajectory are (1) certain to fail and (2) going to make the final crunch a lot more painful and damaging than it otherwise needs to be.”

8. Public sector unions, K-Street lobbyists, Wall Street C.E.O.‘s, billionaire-funded campaign “bundlers” and global financiers, media conglomerates, bankers and businessmen direct ample monetary resources to political influences greasing the skids for their specific discreet objectives. This frequently takes the form of contributions to Democrat candidates at the state and federal level - both legal and illegal - further expanding lopsided publicity benefits for the Democrats if one takes into account gratis exposure provided by a complicit mainstream media. Republican political candidates benefit from these coffers as well if sympathetic to the appropriate people and their causes.

9. King Barry will endeavor to institute further tax increases and may not need congress to pass legislation; he has the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The PPACA is a notable tax increase in and of itself, but there’s even more to it. While it’s true the 2,700 page bill - unread before being passed into law - provides a “legal” basis for patently unconstitutional legislation, it doesn’t spell out precisely how the law is satisfied or fulfilled. In other words, the PPACA grants authority to create legal provisions but doesn’t specify the exact process - the particulars regarding PPACA are still being written - and will continue to be an ongoing work in progress. Open-ended policy implementation has become one way to legislate through bureaucracy; pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt, our first progressive president. Teddy Roosevelt’s abuse of executive orders began a dangerous trend in American politics.

10. Our U.S. dollar is under attack from foreign sources as well as our own government. China and Russia have designs to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency, and headway has been made in that direction. Both countries view the U.S. as an impediment to their own global agenda. India has also taken delicate steps lately to move away from the dollar, but at this point China and Russia are the key players; both have been stockpiling gold. The Chinese purchased 135.53 metric tons of gold between January and March of 2012, and their total purchases of gold in the first four months of 2012 were up 782% over 2011. China and Russia conduct trade using rubles and the yuan. The United Nations seeks to replace the dollar with a global currency. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would like to replace the dollar with SDR’s (Special Drawing Rights): basically, a “basket” of international currencies backed by each members’ government with all mixed together…somewhat similar to the U.S. home mortgage market where individual mortgages were - to a real effect - sliced, diced, mixed, and separated into new derivative financial instruments known as Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). Without its’ status as the reserve currency for global transactions, many believe the dollar would likely have already collapsed.

11. The U.S. banking system, and by extension the global banking system, is - at best - a nearly incomprehensible unmitigated disaster waiting to happen. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 formed a double edged sword with which was severed all contact relating to lessons learned from U.S. economic history during the 1920’s, bringing with it memories of bucket shops, boiler rooms, and endless credit.

The Glass-Stegall law separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. It was the lynchpin sought for removal by the banking industry upon which they spent $300 million over twenty-five years to pull loose, paving the way for what Dr. Thomas Sowell described in his book The Housing Boom and Bust. Low interest rates and the relatively unlimited lines of credit available from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - along with government pressure to lend exerted through the Community Reinvestment Act - helped inflate the housing bubble. In 2008 the single family home mortgage market was about $10.5 trillion. The Fed has since paid tens of trillions to bail out banks home and abroad holding toxic MBS assets, yet bank liability has ballooned while the housing market remains propped up by federal government. The home mortgage market is symptomatic; the illness is derivatives-driven expansion of credit.

12. Derivatives - those roulette wheels of upper-tier finance where highly-leveraged bets on speculative “changes” are placed on just about anything imaginable - have been described as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” One goal of the banking industry’s financial reform push leading to repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act was flexibility with these instruments preferred by the Shadow Banking System (SBS) of alternative capitalization and financing. Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), Credit Default Swaps (CDS), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and other derivatives gained popularity and began trading with increasing frequency on global markets, thus dramatically exacerbating the growing credit expansion problem prior to a bursting of the housing bubble. Dodd-Frank financial legislation made those largest banks playing the derivatives game of creative financial abstractionism not only legally “too big to fail,” but neither can they be sued; taxpayers are left holding the bag when this house of cards tumbles, though it may not matter. What are the stakes for Mega-Banks? About $227 trillion worth of exposure according to Zerohedge.com in their article Geithner’s Legacy: The “0.2%” Hold $7.8 Trillion, or 69% of All Assets; and $212 Trillion of All Derivative Liabilities (1/26/13) about the Shadow Banking System - a financial sector whistling past the graveyard:

As the most recent weekly H.8 statement shows, there was $11.25 trillion in total assets at domestically chartered commercial banks. Which means that just 12 banks now control some $7.76 trillion. And that is Tim Geithner’s true legacy: the “0.2%” now control 69% of everything. But wait, this is just the asset side. What about the liabilities that these assets support, and especially the over the counter derivative side? Well, according to the latest Q3 OCC report, the total amount of derivative exposure at just the Top 4 banks is now some $212 trillion, or 93.2% of the total $227 trillion in outstanding US derivatives.

13. The finances of our federal government and banking industry - inter-connected globally - are a Ponzi scheme. It’s a Twilight Zone of surreal “creditopia” that must continually expand or else collapse. The reality is creditopia can not continually expand. Fractional reserve banking and compound rates of interest work in concert with corruption-riddled government subsidization, mismanagement, fraud and theft, along with ideological regulatory interference and obstruction in the free market to encourage perpetuation of the debt-servitude paradigm Chris Ferreira illustrates at EconomicReason.com (12/28/12) in his article U.S. Debt Crisis - How High Will It Go?:

To increase economic activity [with] this type of system, you need to increase the level of credit and thus debt grows in tandem…if debt is the"fuel” to increase economic activity, interest payments will become [increasingly] larger…eventually [reaching] a point where debt can no longer be increased. This point is known as the Minsky moment—when there is no [further] benefit to [incurring] extra debt. The word “save” is becoming archaic in this debt servitude paradigm, a paradigm that was built on sand with cards and that can and will eventually collapse.

14. The $16 trillion publicized budgetary debt was mentioned earlier as being unrepresentative of true U.S. debt. How much real government debt does the U.S. have? Writing in Bloomberg (8/8/12) Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns spell it out in their article Blink! U.S. Debt Just Grew by $11 Trillion:

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using the Congressional Budget Office‘s realistic long-term budget forecast—the Alternative Fiscal Scenario—is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference—this year’s true federal deficit—is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands. This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and so many others warned of the danger of credit and debt. Dave Ramsey has helped countless people shake the common malady of credit addiction and return to a “cash only” financial footing by teaching them how to live within their means; an aspect of life commonly understood in America not so long ago. Those not accustomed to a cash-based life will find it easier said than done, but it is doable and should be done. If only Mr. Ramsey could manage the feat of teaching our government to live within its means.

Not that credit is inherently useless and always destructive. However, many in western society have been led down a garden path of false assumptions and smack-daub into a conditioned pattern of financial recklessness, among other self-destructive patterns of behavior. “If you can’t be smart, you’d better be tough,” as the axiom goes. Perhaps now it’s time for patriotic Americans to be smart and tough. As we proceed to plan our work and work our plan to the best of our abilities, let us continue “Pushing back the frontiers of ignorance and trying to sell [our] fellow man on the moral superiority of personal liberty and its main ingredient limited government.”