Obama & The Pelosicrats Have Great Depression Nostalgia

Nietzsche is Dead ^ | 16 Oct 08 | foutsc

[Fred]

Youtube - Joe Biden Insults Joe the Plumber and All Small Business Owners

[Only1choice____Freedom]

They don't just have nostalgia, they have plans to bring it back.

The depression started with the crash, Herbert Hoover's tax hike turned a recession into a depression.

Look it up, it wasn't the crash that caused the depression, it was taxes on an already downward economy. Sound familiar?

[slnk_rules]

We cannot load this on the backs of the democrats (although they are certainly complicit).

Our "conservative" president and republican congressmembers have ceded extrarodinary powers to an unelected, unaccountable completely irresponsible, anti sound money federal reserve.

from Bill Bonner and crew, who are as fiscally conservative as they come:

Here in the USA, the Treasury, enjoying new and seemingly limitless powers of discretionary spending, has begun shoveling dollars into every truck that backs up to the loading dock. The numbers are staggering. In ten days it’s reached into the trillions in loans and handouts. Most of this money is getting sucked directly into the black hole of debt and margin calls of one kind or another. This is previously-presumed wealth that is now un-presumed. It’s leaving the system, never to be seen again. One useful way of thinking about it is to regard it as our society’s previous borrowings against our own future. Thus, we are seeing our future vanish into a black hole — our future comfort, health, and basic nourishment.

This is the kind of fiasco that brings down governments, propels societies into revolutions, and starts wars. In a few months, America will be full of angry economic losers. We’re not the same nation that crowded around the old radio consoles for Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Back then, we were mostly a highly-disciplined, regimented, industrial society full of citizens who mostly did what they were told to do, and mostly trusted in authority. Today we’re a nation of tattooed barbarian “consumers” with no impulse control, a swollen sense of entitlement, ruled by a set of authorities ranging from one G.W. Bush to the grifter-billionaire pantheon of Wall Street CEOs — now heading into secret bunkers with their stashes of krugerrands, freeze-dried veal Milanese, and private security squads armed with XM-8 carbines.

I go along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea — read The Black Swan — that nobody really knows anything. We construct our narratives to try and explain circumstances that are unraveling non-linearly before us, and some narratives are more plausible than others, depending on your vantage point. There are infinite narratives. This is nothing more than my narrative. The circumstances we’re entering appear, for the moment, to take the shape of a compressive deflationary depression with the cherry-on-top add-on of a hyper-inflation further down the road — meaning initially that jobs, incomes, and pensions are lost, but that later on even the little money that people manage to get — perhaps mostly from government hand-outs of one kind or another — steadily loses its value. Every way you jigger things, it just ends up meaning the same thing: a much poorer society. It certainly won’t be a society of recreational shoppers plying the Target store aisles for scented candles and home accents. Hyperinflation could make old debts meaningless, but it would also make credit meaningless and spending absurd.

Given the way our society has evolved to operate — as an endless upward spiral of borrowings — you can see an awful lot of things not working anymore, and an awful lot of people not working in them or at them. Maybe the governments of the G-7 will get lending unstuck at the upper levels, but who, exactly, is able to borrow now besides companies on the verge of bankruptcy — and why continue to lend to them? (Except to maintain the pretense that “something is being done”). Besides, there’s much too much previously borrowed money that won’t ever paid back, and the “work-out” of all that debt only implies the continued distress sale of any-and-all assets — so that the USA in effect becomes yard-sale nation.

Personally, I think all the re-jiggering in the world of numbers and indexes will not solve anything, and really only represents a kind obsessive-compulsive neurosis related to numerology that will do nothing to readjust our daily activities toward the production of things that have real and enduring value.

What we can’t face is the prospect that we might become something other than an industrial “consumer” society. My narrative includes the conviction that we will have trouble producing food for ourselves as petro-agriculture fails, and since society can’t go on without food production, I see this activity coming back much closer to the center of our daily lives. We’re not ready to think about that. The downside of our unreadiness may be that a lot of Americans will go hungry in the decade ahead.

None of this is an argument for despair, by the way, but it certainly invokes the need for steeply revised expectations and serious attention to a national “to-do” list. We’re on our way to becoming another nation, whether we like it or not. No amount of numerological augury or even hand-wringing will change that. The big question for, say the 24 months ahead is: how disorderly will we allow this transition to be?

My rxn? Buy gold. Buy silver. Buy some simple easy to operate weapons and ammo. Become a crazy. (yep, I am now stockpiling food). Become as independent as you can be, or at least get off the interdependent web our society has become.

This screed (if anyone reads it at all) will doubtless bring the yapping mockers whose rejoinders essentially consist of " this is the USA, that could not possibly happen here, you tinpot tinfoil hat loon!"

I will be thinking especially of those kind souls as I purchase my next 10 ounces of gold this afternoon.