No Treason

Monday’s updates on the Great Fascist Bailout Package designed by criminal technocrats, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson.

A fantastic analysis,

This is clever and nobody in the mainstream media has figured it out.

If you think the cost of this bill is $700 billion, you’re wrong. The cost is actually infinite and the entire bill constitutes a giant money-laundering scheme.

Paulson can (and presumably will) buy up to $700 billion of these “assets”, then sell them. Let’s say he decides to buy them at 60 cents on the dollar and sell them for 10. You, the taxpayer, will eat the fifty cents, for an immediate cost of $350 billion dollars.

Having done so, he is then authorized to do so again, since the $700 billion is no longer on the government’s balance sheet.

In fact, he can do this without limit, other than possibly due to the federal debt ceiling, which of course Congress will raise any time we get close to it. Oh yeah, this bill does that right up front too. No need to bother with it the first time around.

Folks, $700 billion isn’t even close to the total cost of this monster.

If Paulson and his successor decide to, they could literally cycle all $5.3 trillion of Fannie and Freddie’s debt through this scheme, potentially sticking the taxpayer for 20% or more of the total, plus as much private debt on various bank balance sheets as they can manage to nationalize until (and possibly beyond) the point where the bond market tells him to go to hell.

Bottom line: This bill gives Paulson the ability to nationalize an UNLIMITED amount of private debt and force YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN to pay for it.

How Much Will the Bailout Cost You?

Assuming 150M taxpayers in the U.S., that works out to about $5,000 per person. That’s the right now cost. If it had to be paid for right now, it couldn’t be done. Unfortunately, the government isn’t going to pay for it right now, they’re going to finance it, putting up your productivity and acquiescence as collateral.

Those $5,000 will be compounded by invisible inflation that will mysteriously be “adjusted” away in the officially reported core inflation Index du jour, and a crushing tax burden sure to follow.

And hardly anyone has noticed, that the investment firms, have now become banks.

Goldman, Morgan Scrap Wall Street Model
Become Banks in Bid to Ride Out Crisis End of Traditional Investment Banking, as Storied Firms Face Closer Supervision and Stringent New Capital Requirements

The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to prevent the crisis on Wall Street from infecting its two premier institutions, took the extraordinary measure on Sunday night of agreeing to convert investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. into traditional bank holding companies.

With the move, Wall Street as it has long been known — a coterie of independent brokerage firms that buy and sell securities, advise clients and are less regulated than old-fashioned banks — will cease to exist. Wall Street’s two most prestigious institutions will come under the close supervision of national bank regulators, subjecting them to new capital requirements, additional oversight, and far less profitability than they have historically enjoyed.

Already, the biggest rivals of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns Cos. — have merged into larger banks or sought bankruptcy protection.

“This fundamentally alters the landscape,” a Goldman Sachs spokesman said Sunday night. “By becoming a bank holding company and being regulated by the Federal Reserve, we have directly addressed issues that have become of mounting concern to market participants in recent weeks.”

I wonder what the fallout in Canada will be like. So far, it is all quiet on the northern front. Although I did find this interesting perspective.

Domestic banks may join bailout list

Charles Geisst, professor of finance at Manhattan College, said in an interview yesterday that he thinks foreign governments have good reason to resist stepping up to the plate.

“It’s an American problem,” he said of the financial crisis. U.S. subprime mortgages wound up in a number of complicated financial instruments that banks around the globe were holding. “The U.K. was the closest to it, simply because of the interbank connection,” Mr. Geisst said. But “the German banks who bought these mortgage-backed securities just as investments have got to be wondering what the hell they were sold, as would the Chinese and folks in Singapore. And I think they’re right.”

As usual, FSK is following the money,

Anybody who knew about this bailout ahead of time could have profited immensely. They could have bought the shaky subprime mortgage bonds before the bailout was announced. Now, they can sell those bonds back to the Federal government for a nice profit. As usual, politically connected insiders profit at the expense of everyone else. Only politically connected insiders may do this, because they need to make sure the bonds they bought qualify for the bailout.

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Value driven libertarianism.

If you don’t embrace multi-culturalism, you’re not libertarian.

If you discriminate in your business dealings or personal/religious/cultural affairs, you’re not libertarian.

If you aren’t for X, Y or Z, then you’re not libertarian.

Value driven libertarianism makes me mad.

I’ve been accused of using the NAP as a rhetorical device, but I believe that is only an attempt to dissuade me from constantly referring to what I consider a bedrock libertarian concept. Non-aggression.

I don’t care if people want to engage in bizarre sexual acts, I don’t care if they do or do not inter-marry and I certainly could care less what religion someone belongs to, as long as they do not promote their values to me through aggression. As long as they are content making decisions over their lives and not trying to make decisions over mine, we can co-exist regardless of what values they hold.

Some libertarians are not so forgiving. To them, libertarianism and a free market society carries with it certain guarantees of social structure, the end of some ideas and the institution of others.

I don’t buy that. I don’t know what a free market will produce, and I don’t pretend to know. People might try the free market, not like it, and impose a state upon themselves. Freedom allows all kinds of goofy decisions like that.

Watch out for libertarians who claim to have it all figured out. Odds are, they’re closet statists with their own social, economic and religious (or atheist) agendas.

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I was always pro-choice. Until I ran into Ron Paul. Then I reconsidered my previous position, and realized there may be merit to a pro-life stance. Recently on the Mises forums, I was schooled in the position that women have no positive obligations to a fetus. So now I am conflicted, that women aren’t obligated to a fetus, and yet as potentially a living creature, morally it would probably be right to perform an abortion (where possible) that gives the fetus a chance to survive.

Pro-choicers and pro-lifers look at everything as so cut and dried. Kill it, keep it. I’m blessed to not be that ignorant any longer.

It surprising how many on the left, or the pro-choice side of the abortion debate, will use the argument that a woman has the right to decide over her body. While libertarians will generally agree with this, the left liberal pro-choice crowd doesn’t extend self-ownership of a woman’s body to other areas.

Like prostitution.

While the right can be hyper-moralizing, the left tends to have populist morals of convenience. Neither is based on a philosophical background that can be identified as pro-liberty.

Even on the Mises forums, there are people who will argue that one set of values is libertarian and another is not. As long as the NAP is not being violated, people are able in a free society to do all sorts of silly and ignorant things. The difference between a free society and one under a state is that they have to live with the consequences of their actions. They can’t socialize the costs of their mistakes or prejudices.

I had some interesting conversations yesterday. Two were decent, one was rather poor.

The poor one was about the nonsense that only Americans can be critical of America. America can police the world, define policy and governmental, scientific, monetary, social and legal forms, but no one is allowed to criticize it. Of course if you praise America, that is fine. But if you speak critically of it, you’re some sort of jihadist or anti-American fanatic.

Put simply, Americans are like everyone else. They are not exceptional, although they have at times displayed exceptionalism. The American government on the other hand, is a corruption of the founding principles of that republic, and has grown to be the largest empire in the history of the world. It taxes, it forces, it occupies, it invades and murders. Yes Americans, your government is one of the biggest causes of death by murder in the world. Don’t like that statement? Do something about it, because it is true, and attacking me personally, or based on my citizenship or nationality or religious preference isn’t enough to wash away the blood of thousands of innocent casualties of imperialist policy.

There are some principled humans, who also happen to be American. Mike @ NoState.com is one of them.

There are a lot of people who will talk about the evil of statism, the inefficiency and immortality, without specifically pointing out what is wrong today. In other words, these may be anti-war libertarians (not that pro-war libertarians exist anyway), who never actually speak out against war. And I’m not implying they have a positive obligation to do so, but at the same time, they seem to constantly avoid acknowledging the evil their government does with their coerced co-operation. Although I doubt how much it is coercion and how much of it is the threat of violence or laziness or indifference.

It really ticks me off.

I am embarrassed and disappointed that Canada is participating in the NATO occupation and oppression in Afghanistan. I am tired of my country following the American Imperial War Horse around and sweeping up the dung piles it leaves in the dusty streets of foreign wasteland outposts. We shouldn’t be there, we have no moral authority to be there. By participating in this military adventurism, we make ourselves less safe, and we act as a proxy for evil. Disgusting.

~~~

So to the first good conversation. It was with my sister. She told me, I am “so unconventional”. It was great.

Of course I’m not conventional I told her, most conventions are based upon irrational premises. I am striving to live rationally. I want to have a moral code that I can live up to and defend honestly. No more 50% efforts or casual attention to the substantive matters of the day. I want to be honest about every flaw I have and instead of pretending they don’t exist, work to correct or understand those flaws. A great example is getting angry with others. This is a flaw in my temperament, instead of seeking to irrationally rationalize my temper, I want to understand it, break it down and control it.

But you will find a lot of people everyday telling you how angry they became because of X, due to Y, or antagonized by Z.

It’s irrational to blame other people for my anger, because it implies that only those people can remove my anger and replace it with satisfaction. Of course, there is always Henry Rollins’ theory of the lowest common denominator, which most people cannot grasp. Basically, when everything around you is all fucked up, you are the lowest common denominator in all of your chaos. You are the one thing that ties a mess of conflicts and failures together. You.

~~~

And the second conversation was with a friend named Mike (different from the Mike mentioned above). Mike’s a convenience store clerk, a Gen Xer who likes to smoke pot, work 4 days a week, and just be. He’s a pretty cool guy, and recently I have challenged him on his philosophy and tolerance of the state. Now when we talk, he’s anxious to ask me questions about anarchism, or to defend his own beliefs, as though he has been thinking about them introspectively since our last meeting.

Mike revealed something very interesting yesterday. He recognizes the state is evil, that it is wrong to coerce or steal. He yields these points to me. But he gets more out of the government than it takes from him, and that is a disincentive for him to complain about or campaign against the system. He’s not taxed very heavily, and he’s subsidized enough that he can work to survive, but not have to work a lot, or to necessarily gain more skill, offer more value to the economy. In other words, if he’s careful, he can continue what he has been doing for 8 years already, and do it for another 20 without any significant lifestyle changes. So as long as the state is not antagonizing him, he doesn’t feel any passion or compulsion to speak truth to power or to “rage against the machine”.

I think I am getting somewhere with Mike. I don’t know where, I’m certainly not trying to reprogram him. At the same time, as a friend, I feel I have an obligation to point out the obvious injustices dony by and to us each day.

PS, I’ve started naming some of my posts with lyrics or song titles from Helmet. Today’s title is from FBLA. Another recent post was from the Aftertaste album. There is a method to this madness. Would anyone reading this blog like to know more about marketing a web site?

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