I just received the following e-mail from Bob Robbins:
>WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE ?
... Sorry to bother you, Mr. Obama, Sir?
Excuse me, Mr. Obama, ... I mean President-elect Obama, sir. Um, ... I know you are busy, and important, ... and stuff.
I mean, ... running for president is very important and, ... umm, ... ah, ... I hate to bother you. I’ll only take a minute, OK?
See, … I have these missing pieces that are holding me up, and I was wondering sir, if you could take time out of your busy schedule and help me out. You know, - … no big deal, … just some loose ends and things.
I can't seem to get some information I need to wrap this up. These things seem to either be “locked” or “not available”. I'm sure it's just some oversight or glitch, or something ....... So, if you could you tell me where these things are .....
I, er,… ah, … I . . . have them written down here somewhere, ... oh, wait. Sorry about the smears. It was raining out. I'll just read it to you.
Could you help me please find these things, sir?
1. Occidental College records -- Not released
2. Columbia College records -- Not released
3. Columbia Thesis paper -- Not available, locked down by faculty
4. Harvard College records -- Not released, locked down by faculty
5. Selective Service Registration – Questionable, … at best (under review)
6. Medical records -- Not released … (except for a one page summary)
7. Illinois State Senate schedule – “Not available”
8. Law practice client list – “Not released”
9. Certified Copy of a valid original Birth certificate - - “Not released” (lawsuits pending)
10. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth – “Not released” (lawsuits pending)
11. Harvard Law Review articles published -- None
12. University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None
13. Your Record of baptism -- Not released or “Not available”
14. Your Illinois State Senate records —“Not available”
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Obama Eligibility Issues
I just received the following e-mail to propagandist media outlets from Bob Robbins. Unfortunately for Bob's ulcer, he still believes that they are mass or mainstream media as opposed to propagandists:
>Please report on these activities. I beg of you - for the good of the country! This is probably the biggest story since the beginning of television, and you've almost totally ignored it. Even if it turns out good for Obama, there is a huge story in the number of people who are deeply concerned about this and the number and quality of lawsuits in-work with more to come. Report on THAT.
There are two different lawsuits active at the US Supreme Court right now. One is scheduled for a full conference of all nine judges on December 5. Another is awaiting response from the Obama camp by December 1. So far, Obama has resisted all attempts by journalists and courts to obtain information. He refuses to supply any verifiable data relative to his birth or citizenship. To millions of Americans, that sure looks like he's hiding something!
The only available documents are posted on websites as photographs or “scans” of purported real documents. The existence of or veracity of these real documents have been in question for some time. As of this weekend, technical analysis completed and underway have revealed, with very little room for error, that these documents have been forged or substantially altered.
Dear reporter, journalist, newscaster, commentator or whatever you wish to be called; - THIS IS NEWS!
No specific facts of the situation are above dispute - either pro or con - but the abundance of credible information and the high level of legal activity make this an important topic. Not only should you be reporting it, but you should be involved in significant investigative journalism.
How can you promote your role as a fair and balanced information source when you do not even mention these critical activities? And, many of us watching and listening to you don’t buy for a second that this is because the results aren’t final yet. You always report on many other significant activities “in progress”.
Continued silence is not helping anyone. You are not only allowing, but aiding and abetting a great sore to fester. Better to address it sooner than later. And, it will NOT go away by itself. It will likely only get bigger and bigger.
Please pass this on to many others, blogs, etc., and ask them to ALSO send copies to Fox News, as well as to send Cc and Bcc copies to numerous other recipients.
>Please report on these activities. I beg of you - for the good of the country! This is probably the biggest story since the beginning of television, and you've almost totally ignored it. Even if it turns out good for Obama, there is a huge story in the number of people who are deeply concerned about this and the number and quality of lawsuits in-work with more to come. Report on THAT.
There are two different lawsuits active at the US Supreme Court right now. One is scheduled for a full conference of all nine judges on December 5. Another is awaiting response from the Obama camp by December 1. So far, Obama has resisted all attempts by journalists and courts to obtain information. He refuses to supply any verifiable data relative to his birth or citizenship. To millions of Americans, that sure looks like he's hiding something!
The only available documents are posted on websites as photographs or “scans” of purported real documents. The existence of or veracity of these real documents have been in question for some time. As of this weekend, technical analysis completed and underway have revealed, with very little room for error, that these documents have been forged or substantially altered.
Dear reporter, journalist, newscaster, commentator or whatever you wish to be called; - THIS IS NEWS!
No specific facts of the situation are above dispute - either pro or con - but the abundance of credible information and the high level of legal activity make this an important topic. Not only should you be reporting it, but you should be involved in significant investigative journalism.
How can you promote your role as a fair and balanced information source when you do not even mention these critical activities? And, many of us watching and listening to you don’t buy for a second that this is because the results aren’t final yet. You always report on many other significant activities “in progress”.
Continued silence is not helping anyone. You are not only allowing, but aiding and abetting a great sore to fester. Better to address it sooner than later. And, it will NOT go away by itself. It will likely only get bigger and bigger.
Please pass this on to many others, blogs, etc., and ask them to ALSO send copies to Fox News, as well as to send Cc and Bcc copies to numerous other recipients.
Obama Advocates Inflation, Big Government
The Wall Street Journal reports that Barack Obama is arguing for deficit spending and a sharp increase in government.
The Journal's Jon Hilsenrath and Jonathan Weisman report that President-elect Obama includes in his spending and stimulus plan:
"a list of priorities that included: creating 2.5 million jobs, and spending on roads, bridges, schools and clean-energy programs. Jason Furman, the Obama campaign's economic policy director, briefed Democratic leaders and conservative "Blue Dog Democrats" last week on the shape of the proposed stimulus, according to senior House aides...
"...The advisers Mr. Obama named on Monday hail from the centrist part of the Democratic Party. During the Clinton years they played an important role in turning a budget deficit into a surplus. Now they argue the worsening economy requires steep deficit spending."
There is considerable question as to what the current economic malaise really is. In the 1930s the Fed (not with the support of Herbert Hoover, as many people believe) decided to contract the money supply (i.e., raise interest rates), which led to the stock market crash, subsequent bank failures and unemployment. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Marriner Eccles to be Fed chairman, and he began to re-inflate. In 1935 and 1936 there was a bull market in stocks. In 1936 Eccles in effect tightened again, to the chagrin of the Roosevelt administration, and there was a second crash in 1937, leading to a market bottom. The re-inflation associated with World War II led to a subsequent 65 year inflation that continues.
In the current situation there has been no cutback in the money supply. Interest rates are at all time lows. The excessive liquidity of the Bush years had led to recklessness among bankers, to include both low-quality lending to sub-prime borrowers and willingness to provide credit guarantees, swaps or derivatives concerning those loans across financial institutions. From what I can gather, few bankers were able to assess the risk of the swaps or derivatives which they transacted, and they panicked this year, leading to their unwillingness to lend. This kind of psychological reaction to risk can be undone by adding a few extra shots of heroine. The Fed has added a few kilos.
Banks have slowed lending because of their panicked reaction to their own incompetence. Lending leads to increased circulation of money, which economists call velocity. Velocity increases the amount of money in circulation, because when a borrower deposits the loan, the bank can lend out that deposit. A shift in velocity can cause a short term reduction in the amount of money and a slowdown in economic activity. The velocity of money probably fell during the past few months of the recent bankers' psychological panic. However, it is important to note that not many (if any) commercial banks have failed. This contrasts with the Great Depression, when a large number of banks failed. AIG, an insurance company which owed money to banks was not allowed to fail, so the Fed took action several steps away.
I do not believe that the Fed was able to assess either the risk or the necessity of bailing out AIG or Bear Stearns, nor of the likelihood of Citibank's failure. This was done by guesswork akin to how an investor decides on how to invest in a stock. Someone once said that throwing a dart at a newspaper is as good a way to choose a stock as what portfolio managers do, and the quality of the Fed's decision making is probably even worse than that.
The bailout took two forms. First, a large amount of money was borrowed and used to purchase the complex derivatives from investors. This not only protected the economy but also the well being of a wide range of wealthy investors, including many in foreign countries who have no direct effect on the United States's economy. Again, the actions that the Fed has been taking have been several steps removed from any important economic effects on the nation and have the advantage, much to the pleasure of the propaganda outlets, of helping wealthy investors, the Ochs Sulzbergers, Rupert Murdoch, etc.
Second, the Fed created a large amount of new money and deposited it in the various commercial banks by purchasing bonds. This contrasts with the Great Depression, where the Fed cut back on the money supply. In other words, the situation now may have surface behavior in common with the Great Depression, but little else. So far, it seems to bear the same relation to an actual bank run as as a Hollywood movie's depiction of an earthquake is to a real earthquake. Of course, many billionaires have received direct income transfers in the name of helping the poor...or have the Keynesians dropped that pretense and just started saying what they've really meant all the time---the wealthy should be subsidized via the stock market at the expense of workers and the poor, who should have reduced wages and opportunities?
The result of credit expansion is normally twofold. The average person pays higher prices, and stockholders and large borrowers, i.e., the wealthy (not the young and poor as William Greider incompetently claims in his book Secrets of the Temple ) gain. Stockholders gain because lower interest rates increase the present value of future earnings--a lower interest rate discounts the future revenue stream less and so increases shareholder wealth. Borrowers (to include large corporations, real estate developers, hedge funds and the like) gain because interest payments are reduced and inflation reduces the value of the loan in the future. In contrast, poor people who cannot borrow because they aren't credit worthy, pensioners, the elderly who have anything more than social security but are not big stock market investors (i.e., the lower middle class elderly) pay through higher prices. Old ladies begin to eat cat food while William Greider's buddies on Wall Street see higher returns. The Democrats used to claim that this process helps the poor, and Barack Obama reinvents this tradition, as opposed to the Republican tradition of not claiming this but doing it anyway.
Obama's solution to this problem is to further enhance the amount of borrowing and inflation. His advisers are Keynesians (as are Bush's, there is no difference there) and they advocate several nonsensical ideas. First, you get the government to spend more. This in turn accelerates velocity and "stimulates" the economy. For instance, you have people dig ditches and then fill them up again, and Keynesian economists believe that this is good for the economy because demand has been stimulated. They do not contemplate that wealth is not money but real goods, and government does not produce goods that the public generally wants. As well, their assessment of a decline in "aggregate demand" depends on the existence and neutrality of the slowdown. It is not clear that there really is a slowdown. Rather, the banks may have exaggerated the risk of the derivatives in their own minds, and when they settle down there will be increased velocity. This will be an inflationary period in that case because the amount of reserves that Bush has created has been immense.
I have previously argued that George Bush = Barack Obama and we can see this in Obama's plan for a stimulus package. Obama aims to further increase already enormous federal deficits, increase the already massive increase in monetary expansion and encourage government to engage in boondoggles. Bush squandered, Obama will squander more.
Macro-economics, in which government policy makers are trained, is akin to sociology, psychiatry and theory-y management, the package of quackery that the twentieth century concocted to shore up big government, Wall Street and the Progressives' strategy of convincing the public that big government, which is the chief reason that big business exists, is necessary to regulate big business. Government has been so successful in regulating big business that big businesses like Citibank get $25 billion bailouts while small businesses get to suffer from the inflation. Sounds to me like the Bush-Obama plan is to kill small business in the interest of big.
The inflationary plan that Obama offers is just the same as the inflationary Bush plan. We can look forward to continued decline in the real economy and declining real wages coupled with inflation. Smart people will not rely on the dollar and think in terms of hard assets or going into debt, i.e., mimicking real estate moguls like the Pritzkers (Obama's chief backers), hedge fund managers and the like. It's been a nice ride for the dollar, but I would not want to be holding cash during the Obama administration. It's going to be a big payday for the Pritzkers.
Howard S. Katz responds
Dear Mitchell,
I define velocity of money as (nominal) GDP divided by the money supply.
GDP measures the amount of wealth produced. Hence it measures the total amount of money changing hands per year. Divide this by the money supply and you have the rate at which the average dollar changes hands.
Defined this way velocity is very stable, and there is no evidence that it has fallen.
Howie
The Journal's Jon Hilsenrath and Jonathan Weisman report that President-elect Obama includes in his spending and stimulus plan:
"a list of priorities that included: creating 2.5 million jobs, and spending on roads, bridges, schools and clean-energy programs. Jason Furman, the Obama campaign's economic policy director, briefed Democratic leaders and conservative "Blue Dog Democrats" last week on the shape of the proposed stimulus, according to senior House aides...
"...The advisers Mr. Obama named on Monday hail from the centrist part of the Democratic Party. During the Clinton years they played an important role in turning a budget deficit into a surplus. Now they argue the worsening economy requires steep deficit spending."
There is considerable question as to what the current economic malaise really is. In the 1930s the Fed (not with the support of Herbert Hoover, as many people believe) decided to contract the money supply (i.e., raise interest rates), which led to the stock market crash, subsequent bank failures and unemployment. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Marriner Eccles to be Fed chairman, and he began to re-inflate. In 1935 and 1936 there was a bull market in stocks. In 1936 Eccles in effect tightened again, to the chagrin of the Roosevelt administration, and there was a second crash in 1937, leading to a market bottom. The re-inflation associated with World War II led to a subsequent 65 year inflation that continues.
In the current situation there has been no cutback in the money supply. Interest rates are at all time lows. The excessive liquidity of the Bush years had led to recklessness among bankers, to include both low-quality lending to sub-prime borrowers and willingness to provide credit guarantees, swaps or derivatives concerning those loans across financial institutions. From what I can gather, few bankers were able to assess the risk of the swaps or derivatives which they transacted, and they panicked this year, leading to their unwillingness to lend. This kind of psychological reaction to risk can be undone by adding a few extra shots of heroine. The Fed has added a few kilos.
Banks have slowed lending because of their panicked reaction to their own incompetence. Lending leads to increased circulation of money, which economists call velocity. Velocity increases the amount of money in circulation, because when a borrower deposits the loan, the bank can lend out that deposit. A shift in velocity can cause a short term reduction in the amount of money and a slowdown in economic activity. The velocity of money probably fell during the past few months of the recent bankers' psychological panic. However, it is important to note that not many (if any) commercial banks have failed. This contrasts with the Great Depression, when a large number of banks failed. AIG, an insurance company which owed money to banks was not allowed to fail, so the Fed took action several steps away.
I do not believe that the Fed was able to assess either the risk or the necessity of bailing out AIG or Bear Stearns, nor of the likelihood of Citibank's failure. This was done by guesswork akin to how an investor decides on how to invest in a stock. Someone once said that throwing a dart at a newspaper is as good a way to choose a stock as what portfolio managers do, and the quality of the Fed's decision making is probably even worse than that.
The bailout took two forms. First, a large amount of money was borrowed and used to purchase the complex derivatives from investors. This not only protected the economy but also the well being of a wide range of wealthy investors, including many in foreign countries who have no direct effect on the United States's economy. Again, the actions that the Fed has been taking have been several steps removed from any important economic effects on the nation and have the advantage, much to the pleasure of the propaganda outlets, of helping wealthy investors, the Ochs Sulzbergers, Rupert Murdoch, etc.
Second, the Fed created a large amount of new money and deposited it in the various commercial banks by purchasing bonds. This contrasts with the Great Depression, where the Fed cut back on the money supply. In other words, the situation now may have surface behavior in common with the Great Depression, but little else. So far, it seems to bear the same relation to an actual bank run as as a Hollywood movie's depiction of an earthquake is to a real earthquake. Of course, many billionaires have received direct income transfers in the name of helping the poor...or have the Keynesians dropped that pretense and just started saying what they've really meant all the time---the wealthy should be subsidized via the stock market at the expense of workers and the poor, who should have reduced wages and opportunities?
The result of credit expansion is normally twofold. The average person pays higher prices, and stockholders and large borrowers, i.e., the wealthy (not the young and poor as William Greider incompetently claims in his book Secrets of the Temple ) gain. Stockholders gain because lower interest rates increase the present value of future earnings--a lower interest rate discounts the future revenue stream less and so increases shareholder wealth. Borrowers (to include large corporations, real estate developers, hedge funds and the like) gain because interest payments are reduced and inflation reduces the value of the loan in the future. In contrast, poor people who cannot borrow because they aren't credit worthy, pensioners, the elderly who have anything more than social security but are not big stock market investors (i.e., the lower middle class elderly) pay through higher prices. Old ladies begin to eat cat food while William Greider's buddies on Wall Street see higher returns. The Democrats used to claim that this process helps the poor, and Barack Obama reinvents this tradition, as opposed to the Republican tradition of not claiming this but doing it anyway.
Obama's solution to this problem is to further enhance the amount of borrowing and inflation. His advisers are Keynesians (as are Bush's, there is no difference there) and they advocate several nonsensical ideas. First, you get the government to spend more. This in turn accelerates velocity and "stimulates" the economy. For instance, you have people dig ditches and then fill them up again, and Keynesian economists believe that this is good for the economy because demand has been stimulated. They do not contemplate that wealth is not money but real goods, and government does not produce goods that the public generally wants. As well, their assessment of a decline in "aggregate demand" depends on the existence and neutrality of the slowdown. It is not clear that there really is a slowdown. Rather, the banks may have exaggerated the risk of the derivatives in their own minds, and when they settle down there will be increased velocity. This will be an inflationary period in that case because the amount of reserves that Bush has created has been immense.
I have previously argued that George Bush = Barack Obama and we can see this in Obama's plan for a stimulus package. Obama aims to further increase already enormous federal deficits, increase the already massive increase in monetary expansion and encourage government to engage in boondoggles. Bush squandered, Obama will squander more.
Macro-economics, in which government policy makers are trained, is akin to sociology, psychiatry and theory-y management, the package of quackery that the twentieth century concocted to shore up big government, Wall Street and the Progressives' strategy of convincing the public that big government, which is the chief reason that big business exists, is necessary to regulate big business. Government has been so successful in regulating big business that big businesses like Citibank get $25 billion bailouts while small businesses get to suffer from the inflation. Sounds to me like the Bush-Obama plan is to kill small business in the interest of big.
The inflationary plan that Obama offers is just the same as the inflationary Bush plan. We can look forward to continued decline in the real economy and declining real wages coupled with inflation. Smart people will not rely on the dollar and think in terms of hard assets or going into debt, i.e., mimicking real estate moguls like the Pritzkers (Obama's chief backers), hedge fund managers and the like. It's been a nice ride for the dollar, but I would not want to be holding cash during the Obama administration. It's going to be a big payday for the Pritzkers.
Howard S. Katz responds
Dear Mitchell,
I define velocity of money as (nominal) GDP divided by the money supply.
GDP measures the amount of wealth produced. Hence it measures the total amount of money changing hands per year. Divide this by the money supply and you have the rate at which the average dollar changes hands.
Defined this way velocity is very stable, and there is no evidence that it has fallen.
Howie
Monday, November 24, 2008
James Crum on Our Spiritual Crisis
I just received the following e-mail from James Crum:
>Our problem is not economic, or political…It is spiritual, and I fear greatly that our nation has been handed over to evil men with poor intentions. A self absorbed citizenry, greed, lack of personal responsibility on all levels, a willfully ignorant press, and a dysfunctional social contract have turned America on its head. Once this debacle savages the average American, they will give the issue their strict attention, but where they focus the blame will be an issue.
Mitchell, right now, I recommend reading City of God by Augustine. His times were similar to our own as the known order begins to collapse, and chaos is all around. Piracy, dangerous cities, mass migration, immense political corruption, the list goes on. He straddled the river between antiquity and medeival times. I think that is where we could head, but so much is not yet determined.
I live in a very nice suburb in Chicago metro, but now even our our area is becoming a concern. Not too long ago, five people were murdered at a local shopping mall. Our neighbor's son (17) was carjacked at a gas station, beaten, then dumped onto I- 80. The police caught the perpetrator, and then told the family to not press charges because the gang is too violent. I had a better idea to the Chief of Police- try shooting them as they tried to escape...no one would know or care. Everyday we are getting robberies in very good, affluent areas.
I am retrenching financially as I am able. My wife is stocking a pantry. I am looking into our property in northern Arkansas for a new home once the children have moved out. Firearms and fishing gear are on the list of shopping items. I do not see this going away for many years.
Billy Grahman said something to this effect a bit ago. We have called evil good, and good evil, and so the entire society suffers for it.
We need another Great Awakening... Jonathan Edwards, where are you?
>Our problem is not economic, or political…It is spiritual, and I fear greatly that our nation has been handed over to evil men with poor intentions. A self absorbed citizenry, greed, lack of personal responsibility on all levels, a willfully ignorant press, and a dysfunctional social contract have turned America on its head. Once this debacle savages the average American, they will give the issue their strict attention, but where they focus the blame will be an issue.
Mitchell, right now, I recommend reading City of God by Augustine. His times were similar to our own as the known order begins to collapse, and chaos is all around. Piracy, dangerous cities, mass migration, immense political corruption, the list goes on. He straddled the river between antiquity and medeival times. I think that is where we could head, but so much is not yet determined.
I live in a very nice suburb in Chicago metro, but now even our our area is becoming a concern. Not too long ago, five people were murdered at a local shopping mall. Our neighbor's son (17) was carjacked at a gas station, beaten, then dumped onto I- 80. The police caught the perpetrator, and then told the family to not press charges because the gang is too violent. I had a better idea to the Chief of Police- try shooting them as they tried to escape...no one would know or care. Everyday we are getting robberies in very good, affluent areas.
I am retrenching financially as I am able. My wife is stocking a pantry. I am looking into our property in northern Arkansas for a new home once the children have moved out. Firearms and fishing gear are on the list of shopping items. I do not see this going away for many years.
Billy Grahman said something to this effect a bit ago. We have called evil good, and good evil, and so the entire society suffers for it.
We need another Great Awakening... Jonathan Edwards, where are you?
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