My Letter to the Kingston Freeman Concerning Gary Weiss's Op Ed

The Kingston Freeman published my letter in response to Gary Weiss's Op Ed concerning Ron Paul:

Dear Editor:

Congressman Ron Paul disavows letters which he says he did not write (syndicated columnist Gary Weiss, The Street – Freeman website, Dec. 28, “Ron Paul captures the crackpot vote").

Contrast that Christmas-sized portion of hate doled to Paul to your handling of Barack Obama.

In 2008, there was no criticism of then-Sen. Obama’s associations with anti-Semites and felons, to include Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Father Pfleger. In contrast, Weiss convicts Paul without trial.

Paul is the only candidate to question both parties’ refusal to discuss the bipartisan commitment to the Federal Reserve Bank and its creation of income inequality by diverting wealth from the public to Wall Street.

As Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson of the Jerome Levy Institute reveal,  in the past few years the Fed has purchased $29 trillion in assets.  The assets were financed with dollars the Fed printed from thin air.

We have not felt the effects because central banks prop up the dollar.

To the extent that the toxic assets are less than the $29 trillion, there is a loss to the public, likely in the trillions.

The entire American GDP is about $14 trillion.

But that’s the least of it.

 

By tripling the money supply since 2008 (from $800 billion to nearly $3 trillion), the Fed and the two major parties have opened the door to the money center banks increasing the American money supply 30-fold.

The potential instability exceeds that of the 1930s.

So far, only Paul has raised these issues.

Maybe I can see Weiss’ point:

Why discuss the Fed when there are plentiful opportunities in the op-ed market to call Paul, R-Texas, and his supporters names, but few to discuss substantive issues? 

MITCHELL LANGBERT

West Shokan

mlangbert@hvc.rr.com

Tom Deweese Speaks in Santa Cruz

Tom Deweese speaks in Santa Cruz. I heard Tom speak in the Albany area about two months ago (H/t Chip Mellor). He's a great speaker.  Will America awaken to escalating totalitarianism?

Why Academics are Pro-Fed Ideologues

"Tuition has been rising at leading institutions for the past quarter century at rates far ahead of inflation, reflecting the rising prosperity of the top 5 or 10 percent of the wealth distribution. Philanthropists continue to lavish large donations on prestigious institutions.  College and university endowments, fueled by the stock market boom of the past quarter century, have reached levels never dreamed of before.  In 1981 only one institution (Harvard) had an endowment exceeding $1 billion; as of 2007, more than sixty institutions had endowments in excess of $1 billion.  Harvard's endowmnet reached $29 billion in 2006.  Yale's $18 billion, Stanford's and Princeton's  $14 and $13 billion respectively.  Princeton's endowmeent is nearly $2 million per student, which effectively yields about $100,000 per student annually, a sum tht is more than double the annual tuition.  Many state universities, such as Michigan, Virginia, and Texas, have accumulated large endowments even though they receive annual subventions from the public treasury."

--James Piereson, "The American University: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" in Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick M. Hess, editors, The Politically Correct University. 


Without the Fed, endowments would be at 1981, or perhaps 1937, levels. There would be much less income inequality because the only possible explanation for a rising stock market is subsidy from the Fed at public expense.  This occurs because consistent reductions in interest rates increase the present values of future corporate earnings--the chief determinant of stock prices. Hence, the Fed's low interest rate regime directly subsidizes stockholders at the expense of the general public.  Income inequality results from the same Fed policies.  The wealth consumed by stock and real estate investors, including universities, who produce nothing (in the case of universities, less than nothing) but enjoy increases in asset values, comes from wage earners in the form of an increasing gap between productivity increases and wages.  That gap cannot continue.  Eventually, the public will either stop working or vote the bums who have subsidized the super-rich, including university endowments, at the expense of the producers of wealth, out of office.  Or, perhaps, the nation will simply collapse due to public mismanagement.

Obama Proposes Gosplan Style Rural Councils

H/t Redeemer Broadcasting. The Democratic commentator on this video laughably claims that the Keystone Cops in Washington can  revitalize the Midwestern economy.  Maybe they'll print another $3 trillion and have Chicago banks lend it to a new group of poor home buyers.