America's
Impending Master Class Dictatorship By Stewart Dougherty
| Originally published January 22nd, 2010
At certain times, focusing on the big picture
is important not just for investment success, but for personal welfare,
and even survival. We believe such times are here. It is estimated
that 98% of Americans have never held a gold coin in their hands.
Yet 100% of Americans regularly handle Federal Reserve Notes. From
a contrarian standpoint, the financial message from those two statistics
is clear. Even so, gold is much more than money or an investment
medium; it stands for liberty and throughout history has facilitated
escape and ensured freedom. Never having touched a gold coin is
the monetary equivalent to never having breathed fresh air, felt
the warmth of sunshine, looked up at the stars or risen from the
gutter. Fiat Federal Reserve Notes are becoming nothing more than
sewage decomposing in the vast, toxic septic tank of predatory Washington
politics, epic Federal Reserve arrogance and error, blatant Wall
Street fraud and outright Master Class plunder. Below, we outline
America’s troubling and compounding predicament, and urge
you to think about how to protect yourself from its consequences,
both financially and personally.
Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda
that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months
ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses
propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens
have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary
and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly
increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the
American Republic.
One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis
is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in
other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by
America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years
ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.
According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent
report on wealth, America’s private net worth was $53.4 trillion
as of September, 2009. But at the same time, America’s debt
and unfunded liabilities totaled at least $120,000,000,000,000.00
($120 trillion), or 225% of the citizens’ net worth. Even
if the government expropriated every dollar of private wealth in
the nation, it would still have a deficit of $66,600,000,000,000.00
($66.6 trillion), equal to $214,286.00 for every man, woman and
child in America and roughly 500% of GDP. If the government does
not directly seize the nation’s private wealth, then it will
require $389,610 from each and every citizen to balance the country’s
books. State, county and municipal debts and deficits are additional,
already elephantine in many states (e.g., California, Illinois,
New Jersey and New York) and growing at an alarming rate nationwide.
In addition to the federal government, dozens of states are already
bankrupt and sinking deeper into the morass every day.
The government continues to dig a deeper and deeper
fiscal grave in which to bury its citizens. This year, the federal
deficit will total at least $1,600,000,000,000.00 ($1.6 trillion),
which represents overspending of $4,383,561,600.00 ($4.38 billion)
per day. (The deficit during October and November, 2009, the first
two months of Fiscal Year 2010, totaled $296,700,000,000.00 ($297
billion), or $4,863,934,000.00 ($4.9 billion) per day, a record.)
Using the GAAP accounting method (which is what corporations are
required to use because it presents a far more accurate and honest
picture of a company’s finances than the cash accounting method
primarily and misleadingly used by the U.S. government), the nation’s
fiscal year 2009 deficit was roughly $9,000,000,000,000.00 ($9 trillion),
or $24,700,000,000.00 ($24.7 billion) per day, as calculated by
brilliant and well-respected economist John Williams. (www.shadowstats.com)
Fiscal Year 2010’s cash- and GAAP-accounting deficits will
likely be worse than 2009’s, given government bailout and
new program spending that is on steroids and psychotic.
Putting Fiscal Year 2009’s $9,000,000,000,000.00
($9 trillion) deficit another way, 17% of America’s private
wealth, accumulated over a period of 235 years, was wiped out by
just one year’s worth of government deficit spending insanity.
Given this, is it any surprise that Treasury Secretary
Geithner has announced that the release of the nation’s FY
2009 supplemental GAAP financial statements has been delayed? Remember,
this is the same Secretary Geithner who bullied people to cover
up the sordid details of the AIG, or more accurately, the taxpayer-funded,
multi-billion dollar, Santa Claus bailout and bonus bonanza for
Goldman Sachs. Do you really think this government, characterized
as it is by fiscal and monetary secrecy, lies, chicanery, cronyism
and stonewalling, wants the people to know what is actually happening?
Obviously, it does not, so it hides from the public the inexcusable
facts.
It is estimated that the top 1% of Americans control
roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth. In other words, 3 million
people own $21,400,000,000,000.00 ($21.4 trillion) in net private
assets, while the other 305 million own the remaining $32,000,000,000,000.00
($32 trillion). 77,000,000 (77 million) Americans (the lowest 25%)
have mean net assets of minus $2,300 ($-2,300.00) per person; they
live from paycheck to paycheck, or on public assistance. The lower
50% of Americans own mean net assets of $27,800 each, about enough
to purchase a modest car. Obviously, it would be impossible to retire
on such an amount without significant government or other assistance.
Meanwhile, the richest 10% of Americans possess mean net assets
of $3,976,000.00 each, or 143 times those of the bottom 50%; the
top 2% control assets worth more than 1,500 times those in the bottom
50%. When you combine these facts with Wall Street’s typical
multi-million dollar annual bonuses, you get an idea of wealth inequality
in America. Historically, such extreme inequality has been a well-documented
breeding ground for totalitarianism.
If the government decides to expropriate (steal)
or commandeer (e.g., force into Treasuries) America’s private
wealth in order to buy survival time, such a measure will be designed
to destroy the common citizens, not the elite. Insiders will be
given advance warning about any such plan, and will be able to transfer
their money offshore or into financial vehicles immune from harm.
Assuming that the elite moves its money to safety, there would then
be $120,000,000,000,000.00 ($120 trillion) in American debt and
liabilities supported by only $32,000,000,000,000.00 ($32 trillion)
in private net worth, for a deficit of $88,000,000,000,000.00 ($88
trillion). In that case, each American would owe $285,714.29 to
balance the country’s books. (Remember to multiply this amount
by every person in your household, including any infant children.)
If the common people suspect that something diabolical
was in the works, a portion of the $32 trillion in non-elite wealth
could be evacuated as well prior to a government expropriation and/or
currency devaluation, resulting in less money for the government
to steal. What these statistics mean is that it is absolutely impossible
for the government to fund its debt and deficits, even if it steals
all of the nation’s private wealth. Therefore, the government’s
only solutions are either formal bankruptcy (outright debt repudiation
and the dismantling of bankrupt government programs) or unprecedented
American monetary inflation and debt monetization. If the government
chooses to inflate its way out of this fiscal catastrophe, the United
States dollar will essentially become worthless. You can be absolutely
certain that a PhD. in economics, such as Dr. Bernanke, is well
aware of these realities, despite what he might say in speeches.
For that matter, so are Chinese schoolchildren, who, when patronized
by Treasury Secretary Geithner about America’s “strong
dollar,” laughed in his face. One day, perhaps America’s
school children will receive a real education so that they, too,
will know when to laugh at absurd propaganda.
The government has announced that during the fiscal
years from 2010 through 2019, it will create an additional $9,000,000,000,000.00
($9 trillion) in deficits, an amount that is almost certain to be
understated by trillions given the country’s current economic
trajectory. The government assumes that this vast additional deficit
will be funded by others, such as the Chinese, as it is a statistical
fact that the United States will be incapable of funding it.
Furthermore, with the budgetary equivalent of a
straight face, the Office of Management and Budget reports in its
long-term, inter-generational budget projection that the United
States government will experience massive, non-stop deficits for
the next 70 (SEVENTY) years, requiring the issuance of tens of trillions
of dollars of additional debt. The OMB does not project even one
year of surplus during the entire seventy year budget period.
These deficits and debts are now so gargantuan
that they have become surreal abstractions impossible even for sophisticated
financiers to begin to comprehend. The common citizen has absolutely
no idea what these numbers mean, or imply for his or her future.
The people have been deluded into thinking that America’s
arrogant, egomaniacal, always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt fiscal witch
doctors and charlatans, including Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Geithner
and Ponce de Bernanke, have discovered a Monetary Fountain of Youth
that endlessly spits up free money from the center of earth, in
a geyser of good will toward the United States. Unfortunately, this
delusion is false: there is no Monetary Fountain of Youth, and contrary
to the apparent beliefs of the self-deified man-gods in Washington,
D.C., the debt and deficits are real, completely out of control,
and 100% guaranteed to create catastrophic consequences for the
nation and its people.
When government “representatives” deliberately
sell into slavery the citizens of a so-called free Republic, they
have committed treason against those people. This is exactly what
has happened in the United States: the citizens have been sold into
debt slavery that they and their descendants can never escape, because
the debts piled onto their backs can never, ever be paid. Despite
expensive and sophisticated brainwashing campaigns emanating from
Washington, claiming that America can “grow” out of
its deficits and debt, it is arithmetically impossible for the country
to do so. The government’s statements that it can dig the
nation out of its fiscal hole by digging an even deeper chasm have
become parodies and perversions of even totally discredited and
morally disgusting Keynesianism.
The people no longer have elected representatives;
they have elected traitors.
The enslavement of the American people has been
orchestrated by a pernicious Master Class that has taken the United
States by the throat. This Master Class is now choking the nation
to death as it accelerates its master plan to plunder the people’s
dwindling remaining assets. The Master Class comprises politicians,
the Wall Street money elite, the Federal Reserve, high-end government
(including military) officials, government lobbyists and their paymasters,
military suppliers and media oligarchs. The interests and mindset
of the Master Class are so totally divorced from those of the average
American citizen that it is utterly tone deaf and blind to the justifiable
rage sweeping the nation. Its guiding ethics of greed, plunder,
power, control and violence are so alien to mainstream American
culture and thought that the Master Class might as well be an enemy
invader from Mars. But the Master Class here, it is real and it
is laying waste to America. To the members of the Master Class,
the people are not fellow-citizens; they are instruments of labor,
servitude and profit. At first, the Master Class viewed the citizens
as serfs; now that they have raped and destroyed the national economy,
while in the process amassing unprecedented wealth and power for
themselves, they see the people as nothing more than slaves.
America’s public finances are now so completely
dysfunctional and chaotic that something far worse than debt enslavement
and monetary implosion, terrible curses unto themselves, looms on
the horizon: namely, a Master Class-sponsored American dictatorship.
Throughout history, the type of situation in which
America now finds itself has been a fertility factory for tyranny.
The odds of an outright overthrow of the people by the Washington
and Wall Street Axis, or more broadly, the Master Class are increasing
dramatically. The fact that so few people believe an American dictatorship
is possible is exactly why it is becoming likely.
Dictatorships have blighted history and ruined
lives since the beginning of civilization. In recent times alone,
tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu, Amin, Hussein,
Mussolini, Tojo, Kim, Pinochet, Milosevic, Tito, Batista, Peron,
Pol Pot, Mugabe, Marcos, Somoza, Mengistu, Bokassa, Sese Seko, Franco,
Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Castro have power-sprayed blood onto the screen
of time and ravaged mankind with murder, torture and human oppression.
A full catalog of history’s tyrants would require a book of
hundreds of pages. In the past 100 years alone, over 200 million
human beings have been annihilated by wars, ethnic cleansings and
government assassinations. Just when we think that civilization
has been able to rise above tyranny’s inhumanity and disgrace,
a new dictator appears on the scene to start the process all over
again. Every time this happens, fear and submission paralyze the
vast majority of the affected masses, leading them to “follow
orders” and lick autocracy’s blood-stained boots.
History has proven to tyrants that oppression works.
In fact, it is easy to control a populace, once you control the
money, markets, military (including police), media and minions (the
recipients of welfare, social security, free health care, government
jobs and the like, who are dependent upon the state and likely to
be compliant). This is exactly where the United States is today.
Recent American events paint an ominous picture
of a Master Class that is now in total control.
When 90% of the American people vehemently rejected
the $700,000,000,000.00 ($700 billion) TARP bailout plan, the Master
Class put it on a fast track and approved it anyway.
When a clear majority of the American people said
no to a government takeover of Chrysler and GM, the Master Class
poured billions of taxpayer dollars into those corporate sinkholes
and took them over anyway.
When the people said no to multi-trillion dollar
crony bailouts for the bankers and insurers whose corruption had
caused global financial mayhem, the government pledged to those
elite insiders more than $13,000,000,000,000.00 ($13 trillion) of
the people’s money anyway.
When the people expressed astonishment and anger
that Wall Street planned to pay itself record 2009 bonuses, in the
midst of America’s worst-ever fiscal and financial crisis
caused by them, Wall Street stuffed its pockets with taxpayer-supported
bonus money anyway.
When the people said no to a proposed $40,000,000,000.00
($40 billion) bailout of AIG and its elite trading partners such
as Goldman Sachs (an amount that subsequently exploded to $180,000,000,000.00+
($180+ billion)), the Master Class went underground, covertly misappropriated
taxpayer money and made the payoffs anyway.
When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized
at enormous taxpayer expense, the government approved $6,000,000.00
individual pay packages in 2009 (150 times the average American
wage) for the CEOs of both failed companies anyway.
When a clear majority of the people said no to
nationalized health care, even after being bombarded by a multi-million
dollar, lie-drenched propaganda campaign designed to bamboozle them,
the House and Senate passed nationalized health care bills anyway.
When more than seven million American workers lost
their jobs and were subsisting on unemployment benefits and food
stamps, federal government employees, who now earn DOUBLE what private
sector workers earn, were given another round of pay and benefits
increases anyway.
When private sector workers’ 401Ks and IRA
retirement plans plummeted in value due to economic collapse and
endemic Wall Street-orchestrated market corruption (including systemic
front running, flash trading, naked short selling and other manipulations),
government “defined benefit,” lifetime-cost-of-living-adjusted
pension plans, despite already being underfunded by $2,000,000,000,000.00
($2 trillion), were made richer than ever anyway.
The long, shameful litany of events signaling the
total divorce between the Master Class and the people of the United
States doesn’t stop there. It goes on and on.
The message from the American Master Class to the
American people is simple and clear:
We Defy You.
Governments that openly defy the people are either
already totalitarian or in the process of becoming so. Monetarily,
the United States clearly functions as a totalitarian dictatorship
already, with a Federal Reserve that operates in secrecy, creates
limitless amounts of debt and currency at will, and showers trillions
of dollars upon favored Master Class insiders with zero transparency
or accountability whatsoever. The Federal Reserve is so shameless
about its dictatorial powers that it flatly refuses to provide details
about multi-trillion dollar bailouts and rescues of privileged elites,
in open defiance of Congress and the people. The fact that they
get away with these blatant acts of defiance demonstrates the true
extent of the Master Class chokehold on America.
If the Master Class were a benign despot and if
its policies and programs actually worked, that would be one thing.
But that is not the case. Rather, its programs are in a complete
shambles.
Every single government entitlement program in
the United States is bankrupt. This includes Social Security ($17,500,000,000,000.00
underfunded; $17.5 trillion); Medicare Part A ($36,700,000,000,000.00
underfunded; $36.7 trillion); Medicare Part B ($37,000,000,000,000.00
underfunded; $37 trillion); Medicare Part D ($15,600,000,000,000
underfunded; $15.6 trillion), Government and military pensions ($2,000,000,000,000
underfunded; $2 trillion), Food Stamps (current underfunding difficult
to measure because the number of recipients is exploding; hundreds
of billions underfunded versus original projections, minimum); and
the list goes on. The above underfunding amounts are NET of projected
tax receipts over the next 50 years. But the current recession has
invalidated virtually all long-term budget and tax receipt assumptions,
meaning that the true underfunded amounts are now greater than current,
already mind-boggling estimates.
While the above statistics are terrifying enough
to any citizen with a functioning brain, what is Twilight Zone-eerie
and a far more serious cause for alarm is the casual indifference
with which the Master Class is now making the country’s dire
and irreparable fiscal circumstances even worse.
The nationalized health care program will cost
at least $1 trillion over the next ten years, and most likely multiples
of that. It is being crammed down America’s throat by a bankrupt
government that does not have the money today and will not have
the money tomorrow to pay for it. Worse is the fact that the same
government that has bankrupted each and every existing social program
now intends to directly or indirectly control the health care of
all citizens. Based on the government’s existing track record
and the health care program’s enormous complexity, invasiveness
and cost, the probability that it will become a national fiscal
and humanitarian catastrophe is roughly 100%.
“Cap and Trade” is a multi-trillion
dollar tax scam being foisted onto the American public without a
legitimate debate or popular referendum. You might be surprised
to learn that “Climate Revenues” are already included
in the federal budget, starting with $79,000,000,000.00 ($79 billion)
in fiscal year 2012, which begins only 20 months from now. During
fiscal years 2012 through 2019, the government expects to collect
$646,000,000,000.00 ($646 billion) in “Climate Revenues,”
a completely new tax category. Have any of your elected traitors
told you that they have enacted $646,000,000,000.00 ($646 billion)
in “Climate” taxes beginning twenty months from now
and continuing forever? These “Climate Revenues” are
based on junk science, lies and hysteria, and have been pimped by
greed-diseased parasites who seek to make billions from operating
and manipulating the Cap and Trade “marketplace.” Favored
elitists such as Hank Paulson, Al Gore, General Electric and Goldman
Sachs, among others, have positioned themselves to profit from the
nation’s upcoming Cap and Trade tax misery and economic debilitation.
The reality is that the giant Ponzi scheme called
the United States of America is running out of money. In any Ponzi
scheme, money must constantly be poured into the top of the funnel
in order to pay the redeemers at the bottom. As the number of redeemers
has grown, tax receipts have fallen far short of covering their
withdrawals, a problem that has now become an outright government
funding emergency further aggravated by the fiscal, financial and
economic crises.
If the Washington and Wall Street Axis were not
legally able to create and distribute counterfeit American money,
the Ponzi scheme would have collapsed already. Trillions of new,
out-of-thin-air, printing-press and electronic “dollars”
have bought the Axis additional time, but new sources of revenue
must immediately be found to keep the scam alive. Congress is fully
aware of this reality. Outright tax increases wou