From the Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  The following is an excerpt:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.


These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

The United States has already adopted six or seven of Marx's ten points.  Murdering an American overseas and the Patriot Act are steps toward number 4.  Through the recent bailout of the auto industry, President Obama took steps toward item 7.  President Obama proposed 8.  Nine has been accomplished in part by agribusiness. Agenda 21 proposes to extend item nine.

Future of America at the Wall Street Demonstration

H/t Contrairimairi.  I wonder what percentage of the Wall Street demonstrators are as smart as this guy.
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Corrupt Democrats Use Environmental Rhetoric to Build Neighborhood-Destroying Rural Section 8 Housing

To all Saugerties Residents
 
Public Informational Meeting on  UNAFFORDABLE Housing Project

 Rt.32 Flatbush Road 
Tuesday October 11    6:30PM
Premeeting Rally at 5:30: bring signs, American flags
 
Saugerties Senior Center 

Market St. Saugrties
 
Tell you friends & neighbors as this will be not in the local papers.
 

Publish Post

Warren Buffett, the Ultimate Bubble, and American Decline

America is in the hands of con men.  Would that she were to return to the innovative days of laisser faire when the precursors of today's economic mountebanks resided in the populist hinterland and the fringe of the Whig and Republican Parties.  The Bush and Obama administrations have followed the failed ideologies of Friedman and Keynes as the American economy has faltered.  (A good discussion of why monetarist and Keynesian economists get it wrong is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.)  

In a 2003 article in Fortune  Warren Buffett, Oracle of Federal Reserve Bank Counterfeit, makes these claims:

 ...imagine that the Japanese both want to get out of their U.S. real estate and entirely away from dollar assets. They can’t accomplish that by selling their real estate to Americans, because they will get paid in dollars. And if they sell their real estate to non-Americans—say, the French, for euros—the property will remain in the hands of foreigners. With either kind of sale, the dollar assets held by the rest of the world will not (except for any concurrent shift in the price of the dollar) have changed. The bottom line is that other nations simply can’t disinvest in the U.S. unless they, as a universe, buy more goods and services from us than we buy from them. That state of affairs would be called an American trade surplus, and we don’t have one.

Mr. Buffett and Fortune mal-educate the public.  The foreigner who sells American real estate can exchange dollars for yen or yuan at his bank.  Fortune and Buffett seem not to have heard of foreign exchange windows. All currencies are traded.  Of course, if many foreigners wish to get out the dollar there will a great dollar crash.  This will occur, for the dollar, not gold, is the world's ultimate bubble.  

As well, foreigners can get out of dollars by buying commodities with dollars and then selling them for foreign currencies. For example, if a Japanese investor is holding dollars, he can use the dollars to buy gold or wheat from an American and then sell the commodity in Japan. That would leave dollars back in America and the Japanese investor with yen.  As well, he can purchase dollars from Americans who prefer to hold yen, or use dollars to purchase yen-denominated assets from Americans.  Side payments make a wide range of ways to ditch dollars possible.

The price of gold has escalated as both Americans and foreigners have begun to prefer holding gold to dollars. Foreign central banks increasingly hold gold instead of dollars.  The dollar has fallen.

Foreign central banks can end the dollar's reserve currency status and sell their treasury bonds back to Americans, then exchange the dollars they have received for their home or another currency.  Doing so would cause the dollar to fall as demand for dollars drops and demand for other currencies rises.  If many countries do so, the value of the dollar will fall precipitously.  That Mr. Buffett and Fortune claim that such a situation is an impossibility reflects the ruling class's fantasy that the current monetary arrangement, which is a dollar bubble brought about through central banks' and governments' planning in Wall Street's, corporations' and government's interests, can continue indefinitely.

Eventually, there will be a run on the dollar, and Americans will suffer.  Gold may have its ups and downs, but the instability of the American monetary system will remain until the system is replaced.


A dollar crash should have occurred long ago. All foreign trade must be two way.  If foreigners are selling merchandise here for dollars, then we must sell merchandise there for yen or yuan.  If we don't then demand for the dollar falls and we are forced to stop buying Japanese or Chinese merchandise because it has become expensive. Plants return from foreign countries because imports become expensive.  Inflation would make Americans poorer.  This has not occurred because foreigners hold dollars and dollar-denominated treasury bonds, propping up the dollar. This has caused excessive overseas investment.  The Fed has harmed working Americans while it has subsidized Wall Street, Warren Buffett, and George Soros.


Rather than think logically, Mr. Buffett, America's most talented financier, and Fortune, America's leading business publication, fantasize.  The notion that the dollar cannot be sold deflects attention from the instability of the American economy.  Fantasy is characteristic of participants in bubbles.  It is not impossible for foreigners to sell dollars, and purchase of manufactured goods is not the only form of trade.  As dollar demand for other currencies escalates, the dollar declines.

The flip side of Mr. Buffett's and Fortune's delusional claim that dollar sales are an impossibility will be the end of the dollar bubble--a dollar crash.  Gold and silver, anathema to Fortune, Mr. Buffett, and his Wall Street peers, will skyrocket in value.  Wall Street's victimization of the average American, accomplished by Americans' voting their victimizers' servants into office, will have been complete.