Letter to Congressman Maurice Hinchey Re Congressional Dress Code

Dear Congressman Hinchey:

I urge you to propose a bill that would require all members of Congress to wear the clown nose pictured above. This will fit Congress's competence and intellectual level of development.

Please consider proposing this dress code. It would be the most intelligent legislation you ever proposed.

Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Bill O'Reilly: Socialist

Newsmax recently reported that Bill O'Reilly says that he despises the way that the media treats President Barack H. Obama with kid gloves but that conservatives are wrong to call President Obama a socialist.

It may surprise Mr. O'Reilly to learn that by 1912 previouly Republican but by then Progressive Theodore Roosevelt's platform had become socialist. Roosevelt favored federal government price setting. Legislation authorizing the federal government's setting of railroad rates had been passed in 1906, during Roosevelt's Republican administration.

Similarly, President Obama has been busily bossing around automobile companies and providing trillions in subsidies to his cronies in investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The American approach to socialism of TR and BO has always been socialism of the rich.

Dictionary.com defines socialism is defined as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole". Would not firing the president of General Motors qualify as outright socialism?

Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson would have been shocked at the lumbering Leviathan government that Mr. O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox favor. Jackson in particular would have been disturbed at Mr. O'Reilly's silence about the role of the socialist Federal Reserve Bank in bleeding and wrecking the American economy. As in Jackson's day, today's Fed is emblematic of American socialism for the rich.

In a recent discussion of libertarianism Mr. O'Reilly claimed that the government must focus on the "public good". But President Jefferson would not have agreed that bailouts, social security or welfare programs contribute to the public good. Not much has changed since. Today, the economic contribution of the majority of contributors to social security is less than the economic value of the benefits they will receive. Social security was a pyramid scheme that transferred wealth from the 21st to the 20th century. And the chief function of Mr. Obama's socialist government, as would have been in Jefferson's day had the Federalists and the Whigs had their way, is to steal from the public in the interest of subsidizing bankers, a policy that the socialist Obama administration and Mr. O'Reilly support.

The Chinese Were Suckered

The Chinese have embarrassed themselves. They believed that export-led growth was possible for a nation with a billion citizens. Export-led growth is fine for Japan or Korea, but China is so big that exports can account for only a small portion of the working population. Moreover, technological and scientific improvement limits the importance of labor-intensive industry. Export-led growth is fine to a point, but ultimately the comparative advantage of low labor costs needs to be surpassed by growth in human capital and technology, leading to competitive industry. With the largest potential market in the world, why would not China think in terms of developing the capacity to market internally? This would imply distributed growth, possibly based on the extent of export led growth that it has already experienced.

This would be accomplished through free market capitalist development whereby credit is widely distributed and entrepreneurship rewarded, free of taxation. The Chinese could accomplish this with a gold standard.

Instead, the Chinese allowed themselves to be suckered by Wall Street investment bankers and the US. The philosophical reason is likely this: the Chinese are still Marxists, and they believe that capitalism depends on exploitation. It seemed to them that in order to grow, their workers needed to be exploited. So they focused on low, exploitative labor costs. Then, they allowed Wall Street and its employees in the Fed and in Congress to convince them to invest in dollars, further reducing the cost of their exports. Thus, the Chinese have voluntarily cheated their workforce out of wages in order to subsidize American consumers and Wall Street.

Unfortunately for the United States, though, its public has been bamboozled into the same Wall Street scam: the advocacy of paper money expansion, high taxes and allocation of credit to foolish big business uses such as the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, Long Term Capital Management of the 1990s and the sub-prime bailout fiasco of the 2000's. This has led to a steady reduction in Americans' standard of living, a declining real hourly wage, as politically connected Wall Street opportunists make off with the cream of fresh Federal Reserve Bank reserves. The waste balloons larger as the "conservative"/"liberal" debate, better called the "Progressive"/"progressive" debate, grows ever more insipid, ever less relevant. American political debate has declined to the point where the news is communicated by bungling, drooling cretins who do not understand any of the issues.

Americans lack the intellectual curiosity or the motivation to question the Keynesian, pro-banker model. American politicians have squandered America's wealth on incompetently conceived and executed programs whose main purpose is to waste money. Americans do not raise an eyebrow that 50% of their earnings go to subsidize foolish government programs that produce value equal to 5% of their earnings. Americans are too busy watching "Entertainment Tonight" to care.

The Chinese have the potential to become the leading global power. They can achieve this by following common sense. Their call for a new currency was common sense. But they continue to be suckered by Keynesian double talk and lies. The new currency should be gold. It should be objective. It should not be subject to political manipulation as would a new paper currency. It should not be subject to the opinions of greedy bankers who do not know how to produce value.

I urge the Chinese to adopt the gold standard and the capitalist economic system. Capitalism does not mean exploitation. It means increasing wealth. When freed of the disruptions of paper money, it functions better than any other system.

Why Is CNN Telling the Truth?

I was working out today and someone had turned on CNN. I was stunned that CNN was warning of an attack on the dollar and a dollar crash. This has been true for some time (I have been blogging about this for several years) but I was stunned that CNN is openly discussing this. China, Russia, the EU and other countries have denounced the Bush-Obama bailout and the massive stock market subsidy that the Bush-Obama administrations have effected. Moreover, CNN allowed a speaker to say that Obama would be a one-term president.

But why is CNN willing to cover this? CNN reflects establishment, and it is certainly in the establishment's interest to lie about the very shaky ground on which the American monetary and financial system rests.

I am back in the stock and gold markets. I got into the stock market at S&P 760 or so a few days before the 500 point run up about 8 days ago. I got into gold stocks and gold over the past few days.

Howard S. Katz's "conservative" portfolio is now only a few percent below its October 2007 level. I have fared worse on my own. My total accounts are down about 15% since October 2007. Katz is very bullish on gold stocks right now. He is also bullish on the stock market. I am close to 100% invested for the first time since 2005.

In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt created an economic system based on virtually unlimited power on the part of financial interests, especially Wall Street and commercial banks. He did this by ending the gold standard and permitting an unrestricted fractional reserve approach whereby the Fed has unlimited power to expand the money supply. The Republicans jumped on board with this system in 1971 when Richard M. Nixon abolished the international gold standard that had been reintroduced in 1944.

In 2008 George W. Bush and in 2009 Barack H. Obama intensified the approach. Instead of government by banks, they introduced government by Goldman Sachs. The
Secretary of Treasury under President Bush, Henry Paulson, was a former Goldman executive. Barack Obama received heavy contributions from Goldman. The Bush-Obama administration ensured that all of Goldman's debtors would receive considerable bailout money. Goldman Sachs is the nexus around which all the recipients of the bailouts revolve.

I am trying to figure out whether the US government is worth seriously discussing any more. I am also having trouble deciding whether the Republicans and Democrats have a grain of difference between them. American conservatives and American progressives have one allegiance: the corporate charter of Goldman Sachs.