LIFE AFTER SUICIDE
Ever wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of anxiety over something? Something you feel such dread over you can’t shut your brain off and stop fretting so there’s no way you can go back to sleep?
That was me last night. No matter how much I tried not to, I couldn’t stop thinking about suicide. Not mine. America’s.
I am scared out of my mind for my country. I never felt this way before, I’ve always looked upon America’s glass as half-full all through this nightmare presidency of the last 27 months. No longer – for there was an act of evil perpetrated by that presidency a few days ago that has caused my hope for America to falter.
The Nov. 2nd election last year of Republican control of the House gave us – pro-Americans who want their country to survive – an ace in the hole. Only the House has the constitutional authority to spend federal government money. If the House refuses to spend money on any given federal program or agency, it is "defunded" and they cease to exist.
And that’s all we needed to save America. All we need is to get the government out of the way by defunding its fascist regulations and agencies, by refusing to let the fascists borrow more money, and America could once again be solvent and free.
Then came last night, when I woke up seeing the face of the Grinning Monster who currently occupies the Oval Office, and listening to his contemptuous laugh at any House threat to defund or shutdown his fascist government. Then the Grinning Monster looked at me and said, "Don’t you realize I have an ace in the hole of my own?"
The Grinning Monster played his ace last week, and John Boehner caved. Boehner knew full well he got rolled by accepting an alleged $38 billion in phony cuts rather than shutdown the government. He had no choice – for he was getting calls and messages in the uncountable thousands from military families.
In the fabled Shutdown of 1995, Bill Clinton never resorted to this depravity. Just as Social Security checks continued to be sent out – for a "shutdown" is really a "slowdown" with all sorts of wiggle room for what continues to get funded – paychecks to our soldiers in the military were as well.
But Bill Clinton is a paragon of moral virtue compared to the Grinning Monster – for he blackmailed Boehner by ordering no paychecks to anyone in the US military, including those in combat, if a shutdown were to occur.
Further, he made it crystal clear that this blackmail will occur with any refusal to raise the debt ceiling. Paychecks to our soldiers will be the very first thing to be cut off in the event of any shutdown.
What this means is, unless Boehner & Co can find a way around this blackmail, the US economy is cooked like a goose. Within months, the dollars in your paycheck, your savings, and whatever assets you own, are going to become progressively worthless – pennies, then fractions of a penny, then fractions of fractions of a penny on the dollar.
It’s already started. A friend of mine in New England tells me today that his last grocery bill has almost doubled from what it was earlier this year. ShadowStats calculates that inflation has already hit 10% now and climbing.
I want to be very clear on this. Unless the House Pubs refuse to raise the debt ceiling next month, game over. The Grinning Monster will achieve his goal of destroying the greatest economy in mankind’s history via hyperinflation.
Earlier this month, David Freddoso, a writer for the Washington Examiner, published his must-read exposé: Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy.
Freddoso’s description could not be more bang-on: America is indeed ruled by a government of gangsters, thugs, and thieves that is a mortal threat to all of us.
Economist Robert Samuelson’s description is that America is ruled by a Suicidal Government. Yet since America does have a freely elected government, this means a suicidal people to vote such a government into office.
Does America really want to commit suicide? Do a majority of Americans really want to kill their country? That’s doubtful, at least overtly. It’s more like a lethal state of denial, like a cigarette-addict dying of emphysema or lung cancer and continuing to smoke.
Nonetheless, dying of a drug addiction is suicidal, and America is dying of its drug addiction to government dependency. Almost half (46.2%) of all 300+ million Americans now receive at least one federal "benefit."
Is there anything to be done?
First, there will be no way to avoid hyperinflation if Congress continues to cave to Zero. If the House votes to raise the debt ceiling, refuses to cut at a minimum five hundred billion to a trillion from federal spending now– and yes, shutting down the government if necessary – then inflation will go through the roof this year and be stratospheric next year.
Couple this with anemic GDP growth (e.g., J. P.Morgan is predicting 1.4% this year) resulting in continued and even increased unemployment, and it dooms Zero’s 2012 reelection chances.
However, since hyperinflation will clearly be the fault of Zero’s trillions in deficits, and it will cause such monumental suffering, calls for his impeachment will be heard no later than this fall. By the spring, it will be apparent that the economy cannot tolerate another month of him in office, much less until January of 2013.
But now what? We’ll still have an economic wasteland to contend with. So let’s talk about Weimar inflation.
All of us have heard the stories of the "wheelbarrows of cash" it took to buy a loaf of bread during the Weimar Inflation. And we know what happened as a consequence: tens of millions of Germans starved and died, and Germany ceased to exist as a nation.
Oh, wait – that’s not what happened. It turns out that Weimar Germany quickly recovered. Germany flourished economically and culturally to such an extent that the period after hyperinflation ended in November 1923 to the onset of the Great Depression at the end of 1929 became known as Goldene Zwanziger – the Golden Twenties.
The Germans survived and thrived after hyperinflation. How did they do this?
By reinventing their money – thanks to a guy named after Horace Greeley.
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1877-1970) had parents who had lived some years in the US before moving back to Germany, and admired the crusading editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley (1811-1872, famous for his advice to "Go West, young man!), so much they named their son after him.
After gaining a doctorate in economics, he joined the Dresdner Bank, eventually becoming a director, then also serving as a key advisor to the German National Bank. After World War I, he bitterly opposed the criminally insane reparations forced upon Germany by France and Britain under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, knowing they would bankrupt his country and cause hyperinflation – which they did.
Post-war economic collapse was also exacerbated by a civil war fomented by the new Soviet Union which financed armed Communist rebellions throughout the country, such as Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartakusbund (Spartacist League) financed by her mentor Vladimir Lenin. A Moscow-supported Soviet Republic of Bavaria with its own Red Army had to be suppressed with violent military force.
Amidst this chaos, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that Germany owed them as war reparations 100,000 tons of gold (269 billion gold marks), with the first payment due in June 1921 of 2 billion gold marks plus 26% of the value of Germany‘s exports. The mark rapidly fell from 60 to 330 to the US$ by November.
A year later it was 8,000 marks to the dollar, Germany defaulted on reparations, and in revenge, France sent its army in January of 1923 to seize Germany‘s industrial heartland, the Ruhr, to steal what they could.
By August of 1923, the mark had gone to 1 million to the dollar. A month later, it was 1 billion to the dollar. By the end of October it was 1 trillion to the dollar. Then came Horace Greeley Schacht.
On November 1, the Weimar government named him Currency Commissioner. He knew he had to stabilize the currency but Germany had no gold. What, he thought, could provide collateral for a new currency? Thee was only one answer: land, land owned by the state, property owned by all the banks via mortgages or foreclosed upon.
It took him two weeks to put the deal together. On November 15, 1923 at his direction the Weimar government issued the Rentenmark ("debt security mark") collateralized by most of the land and property in Germany, at an exchange rate of 1 Rentenmark (RM) to 1 trillion previous marks, and 4.2 RM to 1 US$. It was accepted, and virtually overnight, the Weimar Hyperinflation was over.
This gave the American government (which had not signed the Treaty of Versailles and had demanded no reparations from Germany even though it had won the war for Britain and France) to resolve the reparations dispute.
In early 1924, President Calvin Coolidge directed his Budget Director, Charles Dawes, to devise a program that became known as the Dawes Plan which got the French occupation out of the Ruhr and loaned money to Germany to assist with reparations. Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, and Coolidge made him his Vice-President.
Germany stabilized and entered the Golden Twenties. Berlin became the center of European culture, science, and business. (Then came the Depression and Hitler but that’s another story.)
I’m pretty confidant that a half-dozen paragraphs ago, a light bulb went off in "Skye’s" and other TTPers’ heads. Land as collateral to stabilize a hyperfinflated currency? Yes, ladies & gents, we have a genuine historical precedent on our hands.
How much is all the land owned by the federal government worth – some 30% of the whole US or 650 million acres – plus the offshore oil/gas/mineral rights along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf Coasts? That’s a lot of collateral.
Yet the historical lesson here is not the specific template of how Germany saved itself from economic hyper-collapse. Just as the specific causes and circumstances of how and why it collapsed are very different from those that loom over the US, the solution may be just as different.
The lesson is that the horrific nightmare of Weimar Hyperinflation was short-lived, lasting about a year, that the Germans found a solution and flourished afterward.
Will we do the same or experience something far worse? Who knows? But we do know two things:
1) Hyperinflation is now baked in America‘s cake. There’s no way to avoid it any longer, unless the House Pubs are willing to shut off the debt spigot starting next month with absolutely draconian cutoffs of moocher welfare to tens of millions. Think that’ll happen?
2) There are solutions to hyperinflation. There is life after suicide.
On November 4, 2008, a majority of American voters chose to be suicidal. Electing this Zero, this Grinning Anti-American Fascist Gangster as their president was a suicidal act. Now America is dying and those voters are getting what they asked for.
The silver lining is that this monumentally stupid tragedy will sweep the moocher class away. The path will be cleared for a renaissance, a rebirth of a free and constitutional America. An American Phoenix will rise from the ashes of Zero. Suicide need not be terminal.