The Enemy is Progressivism, Not Obama: Dinesh D'Souza's 2016

I just saw 2016: Obama.  Dinesh D'Souza is right: Obama is a traitor.  Nevertheless, the film's lack of historical perspective is troubling. D'Souza's ignoring history allows him to exaggerate Obama's importance.  Moreover, D'Souza colors his facts wrong.  For example, indebtedness that has arisen during Obama's administration is not new.  The president who threw the U.S. into a pattern of heavy indebtedness was D'Souza's former boss, Ronald Reagan.  Moreover, the bigger financial problem is the Republican-and-Democratic-supported bailout.

D'Souza claims that Obama is using debt to bankrupt us. He forgets that Reagan's supply-side economics was just a variation of Keynesian economics. D'Souza forgets that it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard and so permitted the past 40 years of Fed plundering; he forgets that it was George W. Bush, supported by both McCain and Obama, who initiated $29 trillion--more than twice the American economy--in Federal Reserve subsidies to banks. Obama's indebtedness is tiny in comparison to the Fed's 2008 and 2009 bailouts, which the Republicans as well as Obama conceptualized and continue to support.   

Traitors linked to Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations have been running America for a century. The Republicans have plenty to answer for, such as Prescott Bush's and other Brown Brothers Harriman associates' funding of Stalin and Hitler as Anthony Sutton outlines in his history of Skull and Bones.  Sutton describes how David Rockefeller met on a regular basis to trade ideas with a Soviet ambassador at a time when it was illegal to do business with the Soviets. The CFR favored trade with and subsidies to the Soviet Union at a time when billions were being spent to build defenses against them, and more than  50,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

In other words, the disloyal, internationalist pattern started with Woodrow Wilson, JP Morgan, and Bernard Baruch, and continued through David Rockefeller and the investment bankers of today.  Obama is a symptom of Federal Reserve-based capitalism, but D'Souza paints him as a radical new cause.  It was George H. W. Bush's administration that signed the anti-American, anti-colonialist UN Agenda 21. If anti-colonialism is new to the highest levels of American policy making, as D'Souza claims, why did Bush sign Agenda 21?   It is true that Obama is aggressively implementing Agenda 21, but if the Republicans oppose it, why did Bush adopt it? What did Bush mean by new world order, a phrase taken out of the history of Progressivism and Skull and Bones, and does Bush's new world order differ from Obama's in more than a few details?   

Since the beginning of Progressivism in the late 19th century, the Progressives have posed false dichotomies, aiming for a synthesis that differs from both thesis and anti-thesis. The roots of Progressivism were in the nineteenth century German universities where the first American Progressives, such as Daniel Coit Gilman, creator of the modern American university, were educated.  Left versus right, liberal versus conservative,  and Republican versus Democratic  serve to divert attention from the synthesis:  massive rents paid to special interests and Wall Street via the Fed's counterfeiting mechanism.  Both Democrats and Republicans have consistently excelled in paying them.  The political synthesis that will result from totalitarians like Obama and Romney is totalitarianism, but the way to fight it is to step outside the conflict and destroy its pretended universality, not to demonize Obama.  The kind of false dichotomy that D'Souza offers is part of the totalitarian trend.

The points that stick in my throat are Obama's apparent anti-Zionism, hostility to Israel, and hostility to the British.  An America that transfers tens of trillions of dollars to banks will not be of much help to Israel in any case.

Democrats Favor Profit Ban

The evidence mounts that the smartest move an American can make is relocation to another country.  Peter Schiff reveals the ignorant maelstrom that American government has become. H/t Mike Marnell

Philips Electronics Pulls Debate Funding

In this dismal, uninteresting, and tragic presidential election, the only bright spots are Gary Johnson's candidacy and his six percent polling result. Minor parties rarely get more than one or two percent. Six will be the best showing in the Libertarian Party's history and, finally, some evidence that a few Americans are beginning to reject the Progressivism that the Republican Party established in 1908 with the reelection of the first Progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt.  Johnson is the only candidate who questions the current monetary regime and favors sharp reductions in government.  In contrast, both Romney and Obama favored the largest expansion in government in our lifetimes, the bailout of Wall Street, which is no longer discussed in the pro-Fed media.

Philips Electronics is a historically Dutch firm that was founded in the early twentieth century and has been a consistent competitor to GE.  With 125,000-or-so employees, Philips is global. It does  business in more than 100 countries; its scientists and executives speak multiple languages.  Unlike GE, Goldman Sachs, GM, or Merck, Philips has little to gain from the favors of Obama and Romney.

US News (h/t Mike Marnell) reports that Philips and the venerable YWCA have pulled their support from the presidential debates because the Commission on Presidential debates  insists on excluding Governor Gary Johnson.  Manipulation by the pro-Fed establishment is  not new. In the Republican primary, the Republicans and the media cheated against Ron Paul. According to US News:

 In a letter announcing its sponsorship withdrawal, Philips wrote that it was concerned the commission's work "may appear to support bi-partisan" instead of "non-partisan" politics. The YWCA similarly wrote that it was dropping out because it is a "non-partisan" women's organization.

Americans have a diehard bias in favor of the two-party system. Given the two parties' performance, the bias is self-destructive.  Gary Johnson offers a libertarian alternative to twin advocates of Progressivism, whose ideas have caused the real hourly wage to stagnate for the past 40 years, have been responsible for increasing income inequality, have attacked economic innovation, and have cut your standard of living in half unless most of your wealth comes from stock-and-bond appreciation.

The rule that only candidates with 15% or more in the polls can participate in the televised debate evidences the diminution of democracy and freedom in the United States.  The United States has become a two-party-based oligarchy chiefly responsive to corporate interests. Given how infrequently third parties have obtained 10% of the vote, setting the bar at 15% is a clever way to ensure that the presidential debates are limited to unbalanced Progressivism.

QE 3: Gold Bugs, Stockholders Celebrate While American Workers Starve

Joe, a retired, Kingston, NY commodities trader and Brooklyn College alum, is a drinking buddy. He predicted $1750 gold on Labor Day while he, Mike and Mark Marnell, a left wing attorney, and I were imbibing a 1.75 liter bottle of four-year-old single malt scotch called McClelland's.  I picked it up at JK's Wine and Liquor in the Kingston Plaza mall. For only $43 for a jumbo bottle, McClelland's is a good buy.

On that fateful Labor Day Joe predicted $1750 gold this month.  It just about hit $1750 the other day, but today it soared to a bid of $1769 (at 2:26 P.M.).  The reason is the Fed's announcement of quantitative easing.  My brokerage accounts, because of the recent moves in the general stock market coupled with the recovery in metals prices and real estate,  are at or near all-time highs.  According to Kitco: " Spot gold was last quoted up $37.50 an ounce at $1,769.50.  December Comex silver last traded up $1.298 at $34.60 an ounce."  The stock market is also buoyant: The Dow is up 224 points, or 1.68 percent, and the S&P 500 is up 1.76% at 1461.

Quantitative easing or QE3 is one more round of money printing. Monetary expansion boosts the stock market because increasing the quantity of money reduces the price of money, the interest rate. A lower interest rate increases the discounted future value of profits. That increases the stock market because stock prices discount future earnings. It is a mechanical relationship.  As a result, the Fed has played the Nixon card with Obama: in 1972 Nixon encouraged then-Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to ease so that the stock market would go up; now, Ben Bernanke's Fed is easing and Obama will win the election. Likewise, the Europeans are accommodating Obama.  A recent German court decision held that Germany can participate in a bailout of profligate Greece and other southern rim nations. Hardworking Germans can now sacrifice their savings to fund pensions of Greek public sector retirees who have produced little and demand much.

Joe does not have much faith in the stock market.  He is right in a fundamental sense: there is no reason to have faith in the structural reality of the underlying economy. The excesses of the Clinton and Bush years are still around, and Obama has done nothing to correct them.  Americans, for an unfathomable reason, tend to reelect presidents when the stock market is high. The monetary expansion that increases the stock market harms most of them; in other words, most Americans vote for politicians who directly harm them.

The reason is that the monetary expansion that boosts the stock market devalues wages.  As the money supply has expanded since the Reagan and Clinton years, the link between real wages and productivity has been eliminated for the first 40-year period in American history.  American workers are no better off today than they were in the early 1970s, but stockholders are much better off. In other words, the income inequality that liberals grieve over is directly due to the policies of Paul Krugman, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama. Obama has done nothing to clean up this mess.  Historically, he has contributed more to it than anyone else.

The stock market may continue up through the fall and possibly into 2013.  Eventually monetary bubbles implode as bondholders realize that their bonds are going to become worthless.  As real interest rates start to rise, Fed policy becomes irrelevant.  If the Fed continues to print money thereafter, there will be a monetary collapse.  Otherwise, there will be rising interest rates and stagflation as the expansion of the monetary base is transformed into cash money.

If real interest rates start to rise, the stock market will not do well, but commodities will because of the inflation.  If the dollar remains stable, the increasing money supply will continue to boost the stock market. 

I am easing out of the stock market.  I had sold the stocks in my pension fund (I still have real estate), which were about five percent of my total stock holdings.  I have low-beta (low-risk, high dividend) stocks like Philip Morris, Kimberly Clark, and Heniz in one brokerage account, and higher risk stocks in the other. I will sell the higher-risk stocks over the coming months, except for the gold mine stocks.  I hold both the gold index and the Van Eck juniors index.  I would like to be able to pick gold mining stocks, but I lack the expertise.

The stock market is likely to continue up into the coming year; thereafter, all bets are off.  If you look at a picture of the S&P 500 since 1950 there are two massive peaks in 2000 and 2007; we are approaching the height of those two peaks now.  Because of the massive monetary stimulus, the peak could get higher in nominal terms.  As the monetary expansion translates into a depreciating dollar the reverse can and will occur.