My 86 year-old uncle and I have had many lively email debates over the years. He’s a libertarian, too--and while we agree on most things, many times our exchanges end up leading toward deep disagreements. He’s a big believer in real money--gold and silver. I am too, but I got killed betting on silver futures in 2011. Even if had I stuck with the real stuff I would have gotten killed on it. It hit $14 or so today. My uncle remains unfazed. He believes in holding such things forever if need be. He’s extremely anti-gambling and would never touch the stock market.
My uncle is a terrific writer, actor and ukulele player. He has a wonderful voice. After all, he had a long career as a radio and TV personality and broadcaster. He never went to college, but he has learned a lot on his own. Still, at times he strikes me as being a bit obtuse. I suspect he purposely draws me in so he can get me arguing with him. He enjoys poking holes in my arguments.
One of our most recurring debates revolve around our system of money. I claim we are no longer a capitalist country. Not in any pure sense. Increasingly, we are controlled by a relatively few ultra-rich oligarchs who are running the show. Those people aren’t capitalists—they are crony capitalists. In other words, fascists who rig their own system. They love money and continually want more—along with the power and influence it brings and they will rig the game to get it. Nearly everyone else? Forget about ‘em. Damn useless eaters!
Powerful bankers are among these top oligarchs. They happen to own and control a private printing press. They print money for themselves. If I tried that, I’d be arrested for counterfeiting. The private banks who own the Federal Reserve have taken full advantage of their power. As a result, they own most of the media. They own Wall Street. They own politicians. Their politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, get rich from the lobbyist money they receive as well as the insider deals they make. Government loves the Fed because it prints up as much money as they want for their salaries, their pork barrels, their wars and their own personal power. Our representatives have become the new royalty, but the real kings are the bankers with the printing press. They are globalists who want to own and control everything in the world. As the late George Carlin put it,
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses and the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."
Now, if I bring any of this up, my uncle will inevitably complain that I’m for class warfare and that I ‘hate the rich’ or that I’m ‘for socialism.’ He despises government handouts and even once expressed guilt for collecting his own social security payments. (I explained to him that it was HIS money all along and that he’s finally getting it back). I’ve often tried to explain to him that the richest 1 percent in this country control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. They now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. I tell him wages for the middle class have been stagnant for almost 20 years while many leading CEOs make more in one day than many of their lower class workers make in an entire year.
This disconnect in interpreting economic events has a lot to do with our age difference. When he began his radio career in the late 1940s, things were a lot different. An average working man in the 1950s could raise a large family, own a house and car and a TV and put his kids through college. The dollar was still fairly sound and had buying power. The Fed wasn't doing QEs back in those days. Now the Fed must have them continually to keep 'their' rigged market propped up as a signal that 'all is well' in order to justify the first rate hike in nearly a decade. They have to do this to have some ammo and leverage over their own system. Instead, the system seems to be imploding for a variety of reasons. Namely, the debt has become too unmanageable. The Chinese are no longer buying Fed paper and the nouveaux riche there are dumping Chinese stocks and, as a result of margin calls, are also forced to dump their American stocks. Soon we will hear renewed cries for another bailout just like in 2008. In essence the Fed is bailing out the world to keep the primacy of their corrupt petro-debt-dollar going. Today the Dow rose over 600 points in a matter of hours. I could almost smell the QE4.
The Federal Reserve now runs more and more of the show and they’re playing a shell game to keep their private monopoly going at all cost. They can't stand gold and silver--real money. That has to be suppressed. They can’t stand the thought of being audited. That way the taxpayers who are forced to support their rigged game will find out just how much they’ve been screwed for years. The Fed cloak of secrecy has now been extended to outright lies about economic data. Negative data are converted to positive data. The US is becoming like the old Soviet Union. Political correctness rules the day. Mention the Federal Reserve at all and you're portrayed as a kook. Media arms are like Pravda. They’re there to support their Federal Reserve party commissars and keep the populace ignorant.
The entire system now chalk full of debt from top to bottom. Credit cards are maxed out, housing is dead and oil prices are indicative of an overall slow down. Unfunded liabilities? They’re pushing $200 trillion.
We do not have free markets and they can fly right back up at the flip of a Fed switch. We just saw that today. After all, the top ten percent in the country owns over 80 percent of stocks. The QEs protect the Fed and the rich. They do nothing for the vast majority of Americans. The money always goes to the top of the pyramid first. I’ve pointed all this out to my uncle before and he accuses me of wanting to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders, along with Rand Paul are the only presidential candidates who actually want to do something about ending the Fed and taking down the banker monopolies. Sanders wants to do this via socialism. Rand Paul wants a return to a true capitalist system. That means ending the Fed and returning control of money back to where the Constitution stated--to Congress. Both candidates face an uphill battle because they’re crossing lines with powerful status quo forces with wallets the size of continents.
My uncle would tell me that the average man is lazy. He wants free stuff. The average man will gladly trade liberty for that free stuff in order to be ‘taken care of’ by big government. In some cases he is right, but such generalizations are generally wrong. The problems aren’t the fault of the average Joe who is just trying to make a living. I’ve known a lot of lower and middle class workers and there’s no way they want to be on the dole. There’s no way I would want to be on the dole. We all will gladly work hard to make a living. Too bad that work is increasingly becoming unavailable.
Most people are conscientious and just want a fair shake. That has become increasingly more difficult in this country. College grads are stuck with enormous debt. Home ownership has become a distant dream. Rents are rising. Trade agreements strip away jobs and send them overseas slave labor. The IRS is always there to harass and shave off profits from anyone who becomes too industrious. People lose work and get their homes repossessed by the banks. The same banks who printed it up the money for it out of thin air in the first place. The people know something is very wrong in this country. They know the system is broken. It has been replaced with rigged, crony capitalism that benefits the very top of the pyramid. The top enjoys getting fabulously richer from their own private casino while the middle class picks up the tab if any losses occur. Now that middle class is going away.
Most people are starting to agree with the late George Carlin, who said the American Dream has become just that—a dream.
MY SOLUTIONS:
1. End the Federal Reserve. Take the money printing device out of the hands of the one percent and return it to Congress. At least the people will have more transparency that way. Right now, what the Fed does is kept secret. If Congress must print money, let it be similar to Lincoln's greenbacks and don't charge interest. Print up money that's commensurate with economic production and make sure that money doesn't go to private banks only.
2. Debt jubilee including wiping off all college debt from the books. A total restart of the economy without income taxes. That means cutting government drastically. Let's have more power to local and state governments instead of the bloated central government leviathan that wants to make all our decisions for us. Make social security payments voluntary. End Obamacare. End lobbyists. Break up the big insurance companies and big pharma. Make medical care competitive so prices drop naturally.
3. Return to real money; gold and silver as ordained in our Constitution.
4. End all the free trade agreements and make sure Americans come first. If that means tariffs, so be it. If that means ending illegal immigration and ending the 'sanctuary' from the cities, so be it. We either have laws that apply to everyone or we don't have laws. Stop union busting and stop under-the-table cheap labor. Let's get fair wages again so American families can survive.
5. End foreign intervention and end the wars. The U.S. should stop trying to be an empire. End the ridiculous war on drugs altogether.
