Fantastic catch by trueslant.com:

“

By Evan Newmark

Hank Paulson is a national hero.

I said it last October and I’m sticking by it. And now, there’s actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over.

via Mean Street: It’s Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero – Deal Journal – WSJ.

So here’s the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark’s paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity — did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don’t you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his “Mean Street” column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

I didn’t get an answer, which I guess is not surprising. But in the interim I found out that Newmark did, indeed, work for Goldman. I find it funny that a business journalist has to disclose if he’s invested in this or that stock, or short this or that security, before a newspaper will allow him to have an opinion about anything even distantly related to that company — but you don’t need to disclose anything if all you’re doing is kissing your former boss’s ass.

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a ‘national hero’?”

I found this quote of a quote in Art Carden’s essay on mises.org:

In the late 1940s, a group of classical-liberal scholars formed the Mont Pelerin Society with the goal of carrying the liberal tradition through the storm of post–World War II interventionism, and a speech from their first meeting, in which Friedrich Hayek quotes John Maynard Keynes, suggests an answer:

It is more than likely that from their point of view the practical politicians are right and that in the existing state of public opinion nothing else would be practicable. But what to the politicians are fixed limits of practicability imposed by public opinion must not be similar limits to us. Public opinion on these matters is the work of men like ourselves, the economists and political philosophers of the past few generations, who have created the political climate in which the politicians of our time must move. I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that

the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.

Mr. Carden concludes:

“Thus, I follow the advice of others who have come before me and I try not to get too caught up in or depressed by current events. Things are what they are, and there is little if anything I can do to change them over the very short run. My hope is that today’s political disasters will spark a passion for ideas, a passion for truth, and a passion for justice. These are dark times, but the foundation has been laid for a classical-liberal renaissance. Policy after policy threatens us with short-run malaise, but I for one remain hopeful and optimistic.” (Read more from mises.org”>Read more from mises.org)

The term inflation deserves some comment. Strictly speaking, Austrians define inflation as a rise in the monetary supply. Rising prices are only a consequence of inflation. The government wants to term to refer only rises in the Consumer Price Index, because 1) they hate calling attention to money-printing, and 2) they can manipulate the index to lie about prosperity. The CPI, for example, excludes cost of food and fuel.

However, even Austrians have slipped when it comes to the related term “hyperinflation.” Everybody uses it to refer to a rapid rise in prices (or, inversely, a rapid fall in the value of money).

Around 9:20 Marc Faber says:
“Bernanke is a madman. . . . he is a wealth-destroyer and an economic criminal.”
“Timothy Geithner is dishonest.”

pt 1

In part 2 Marc Faber makes the case that there is no deflation, only inflation.

pt 2

pt3

Since beginning my autodidactic study of economics, I’ve begun to see welfare as a surprisingly destructive force. It plunders economically the productive people who pay for it, and plunders morally the communities who receive it as well as the bureaucracies which administer it.

“This week, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking that goal quite literally, proposing to eliminate cash assistance for the state’s poorest families altogether. Legislators, poverty researchers and poor parents alike greeted with astonishment his unprecedented call to drop the state’s welfare-to-work program, known as CalWORKs.

The governor’s proposal would make California the only state in the nation to reject Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grants, the federal program that allows states to draw funds as long as they impose strict time limits and work requirements on recipients.

Rejecting the $3.7 billion federal grant would save the state its matching portion of $1.8 billion. But it also would result in the loss of $600 million in federal stimulus funds – money economists and poverty watchers say is desperately needed to invigorate a moribund economy.

The proposal landed in uncharted territory in the Capitol and beyond, with no one able to predict what legislators ultimately will do as the extraordinary recession deepens.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, Schwarzenegger’s proposal to eliminate CalWORKs appeared to be, if not dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Legislature, then on life support.” (Read more from mercurynews.com)

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ~George Orwell

The concern is that if anyone holding lots of dollars finally gets fed up with our government’s debasing of the currency, they will start dumping their dollars for whatever they can get their hands on, creating a mad flight away from the currency, and the next morning, our dollars will be worthless.

“Remember how the Chinese laughed at Geithner when he said their American investments were safe?

The laughter was not just the opinion of those sitting in the audience listening to Geithner’s speech.

One of China’s official newspapers, The Global Times, reports that an online poll of Chinese citizens found that 87 percent of respondents believe China’s dollar-assets are unsafe.

The paper concluded, ‘Ordinary Chinese people are discontent with the declining value of China’s huge foreign exchange reserves denominated in U.S. dollars.’” (from washingtonblog.com)

“As HR 1207 gains momentum and co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, the Federal Reserve is planning to fight the tide calling for an audit of its books by hiring a veteran lobbyist to ‘manage its relations with Congress,’ according to Reuters.

The Fed plans to hire Linda Robertson, who previously worked for now-defunct energy company Enron, as well as the Clinton administration.” (Read more from blacklistednews.com)

I think and hope she will lose this fight. We are very organized and very passionate. The only question is: what mighty levers can the money-printers pull with our government?

See Also: Ron Paul’s HR1207 (The Federal Reserve Transparency Act) now has 224 co-sponsors!

This is a direct consequence of too much government power. If, in the name of stability, or to prevent a so-called disaster, or to help the poor, we give the government the power to decide which incompetent banks survive, the opportunists in government will use the power to take care of their own investments. We did, and they did. The crooks are in charge.

Don’t let the media fool you into believing government is the thin line keeping evil businessmen from harming us. Government, and their self-serving collusion with business is the problem. Freedom is the solution.

“From stock holdings to retirement funds to mortgages, more than 20 House leaders and members of the House Financial Services Committee had large personal stakes in the Wall Street powerhouses whose collapse last year led to an unprecedented government intervention in the marketplace. In some instances those lawmakers, like millions of other investors, sold their holdings at steep losses while others retained the stocks at greatly diminished value.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband lost hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in American International Group, which has received $170 billion in government loans and cash injections, making it by far the largest recipient of federal bailout dollars. Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his wife held stock, retirement plans and other investments worth at least $183,000 and as much as $495,000 in firms benefiting from federal government rescue efforts, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

At least 18 members of the House Financial Services Committee — which oversees the banking and housing industries at the core of the economic meltdown — held stock last year in firms that received federal bailout assistance, according to a review of the forms that were available yesterday.” (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

“Federal authorities arrested an Asheville man in what they said was a scheme to undermine the U.S. currency system and defraud consumers with so-called Liberty Dollars.

William Kevin Innes marketed the ‘barter’ currency in Western North Carolina and recruited merchants willing to accept it and give it as change for products bought with real money, according to an indictment unsealed this week.

Innes, 53, faces up to 45 years in prison if convicted.” (Read more from prisonplanet.com)

It is against the law for businesses to refuse U.S. Dollars. This is very good for our government because they own the printing press, but very bad for us, because we cannot freely exchange goods and services. Our government is actively debasing our currency, and thereby confiscating our wealth.

Old news, but important to remember:

“Momentum is building with 179 co-sponsors for Congressman Ron Paul’s bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to audit the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009) not just because of the growing unrest over the Fed’s gigantic and reckless expansion of trillions of dollars in credit during the past eight months but because of the increasing awareness that the Fed itself is unable to account for where this money has gone. According to a report from Bloomberg News on February 9th:

The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. . . .

Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed. . . .

Bloomberg requested details of Fed lending under the Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.

At a hearing in early May, Federal Reserve Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman was asked by Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) to account for the $9 trillion in off-balance sheet transactions ($30,000 for each man, woman and child in the U.S.) plus a $1 trillion expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet since last September. Her answer is that no one at the Fed knows or is keeping track of where the money has gone.” (from independent.org)

Jim Rogers is completely right to ridicule Bernanke. Bernanke, for all his educashun has almost never been right. He’s either an idiot or a liar.