For the past 35 years “organized resistance” seems to have consisted largely of prison riots and lunatic fringe right-wing cults getting in standoffs with the FBI and ATF and doing themselves in. There are on the other hand large-scale demonstrations etc. done by various groups whose inclinations could turn toward greater militancy in the future, which may be why they’re so intensely harassed by law enforcement. I’m not sure what they would accomplish. Unlike the 1930’s street battles I’d expect the left wing to play Ghandi while the right wing (i.e. police, military, Republicans, KKK, Aryan Nations, etc.) hauls them off to indefinite incarceration en masse or otherwise slaughters them as opposed to the left wing getting militant. Fox News would doubtlessly report that the demonstration had been efficiently dispersed with no mention of casualties (even 100% KIA), if it’s mentioned at all. By the time the results of the first few such mass arrests percolate through the media blackouts there won’t be much left of these movements.

I don’t see the pinpoint strikes having much historical precedent in the US. Literally the only instance I can think of is Alexander Berkman vs. Henry Clay Frick. I doubt they’d get far to begin with. A rich man has no country. The moats around their gated communities have names like “Atlantic Ocean.” Their gated communities have names like “Liechtenstein” and “Monaco.” When pressed, sufficiently geographically isolated tax havens like Vanuatu could serve their purposes. Then there’s the “you and what army?” question when each has a literal mercenary army feeding off a palace economy centered around them. The would-be assailants are going to be marooned on the opposite side of the planet from the oppressors they wish to target, and further face the challenge of getting through a mercenary army of bodyguards with all the tanks and helicopters implied, and infiltrating fortresses to boot.

I think the thought I’m having here is that the “authorities” so to speak are more than ready to take on starving hordes and have been preparing for it for some time. I rather doubt the “concentration camp” junk since the logistics of large-scale mass incarceration (e.g. 10M people) actually aren’t that difficult to improvise, plus the concrete evidence is actually that they’re not there, unless you count preexisting prisons. It doesn’t take a very hard look at cops these days to see they’re heavily militarized and more than ready for outright warfare whether or not their designated opponents fight back at all, as is apparent from the daily barrage of police brutality stories coming across the news wires. Also note that Geneva conventions regarding chemical and various other exotic sorts of weapons don’t apply to civilians, not that they’re enforced anywhere anyway except as quasi-legalistic charades to continue warfare against defeated opponents.

I’ll leave it there since I’ve already blustered on too long.

I can’t believe I missed this! I’m going to have to do some more reading me thinks….

Your logic is the logic that has caused this mess. What a stupid statement.

“John Galt–Don’t blame the public for 4 ipods 3 TVS and a few cars. Blame the banks for throwing applications at your doorstep. Blame the BANKS for cheap loans….”

You’re just another lazy democratic piece of crap looking for a hand out from someone else, and one of the idiots who blames all their problems on other people. No matter what anyone offers a person, the person has to make financial decisions for themselves. Just because loans were cheap doesn’t mean you need to buy a gigantic house. Just because you have 0% interest financing for 2 years doesn’t mean you need to buy that product if you don’t have any money.

It isn’t the job of lenders to make personal financial decisions for the customers. Just because a bank is able to look at a credit score and approve you for a ton of money doesn’t mean they have access to your personal budget or personal financial objectives.

In the past, the only people who used debt were people in difficult financial situations. People looked down on others for using debt. Today we triumph people for using debt. Today’s reward for being financially successful is to act like a person who was considered a financial failure in the past. This type of mentality has caused this mess.

Debt is useful in certain circumstances but it is extremely dangerous. THE TRUTH IS THAT THE DEBTOR BECOMES THE SLAVE TO THE LENDER. So America and the rest of the world has sold themselves into slavery. If you don’t believe me, what happens to the money you earn from your labors if you take out a lot of debt? The majority of your earnings go to someone else, and if you stop paying them, they can take everything you own. If that isn’t a form of slavery, I don’t know what is.

And in the end, each one of us makes the choice to sign on the dotted line. No one (not the government, bank, salesman,…etc.) holds a gun to your head and forces you to accept debt. Humanity has fought for centuries for freedom and in the relatively small amount of time we have sold ourselves and our children’s future right out of it. Shame on all of us.

Major financial news services have reported that the federal government has committed Americans to $9.7 trillion worth of bailouts. Only a small portion of this has actually been made available yet, but that is what the government says it will pay out. This sum is enough to pay off 90% of ALL the mortgages in America, including all the “good” mortgages.
If the banks are in trouble because of bad mortgages, then the smart thing to do would be just pay off all of the bad mortgages. This would allow those whose salaries have been cut, or get cut, to still be able to afford to live on less income, as well as stimulate the economy. However, folks who are not yet “underwater” don’t enjoy the prospect of higher taxes for the rest of their lives, due to other’s mistakes. A Jubilee on all debt is the only way to reset a system that has grown unrepairable.
The President’s plan to solve the “mortgage crisis” is misdirected. The current corporate welfare spending bill {disguised as a “stimulus” package} is like a machine gun shooting all around the target but missing it entirely, and will make matters much worse, just as the actions of the government in the 1930’s caused the depression to drag on for over a decade. It’s also an opportunity to enact top-down social programs that have been rejected over the years as too costly, as well as despised by taxpaying Americans.
It is disappointing to me that most biblically oriented people are ignorant of the need {and authority} to regularly declare a Jubilee on all debt. This would set an example for the whole world to follow, and is an opportunity to lead, which might actually give real hope, and more than empty promises of change.

Some of these employees, earning barely above minimum wage have to pay 50%, yes, that is 50% of their net pay if they want family medical insurance, so any employees with a kid, or a spouse, that can’t afford it, simply go apply for welfare at tqaxpayer expense? Umm, wonder how much the PE firm is charging per hour? Bet it’s alot more than barely above minimum wage!

And then you look at what these nuclear concerns make, and you look at these people that are temped out so that the nukes don’t have to offer them the same working conditions as the more privleged employees and they are literally dumpster diving and applying for welfare to survive.

Think they’ll put that in their next glossy investor newsletter? Nuclear Janitors dumpster diving to survive this economic collapse!

Yeah America has a collosal problem, it’s called GREED.

Americans riot - Get real!!!

Tom Dennen

Read a great piece the other day, going around the Internet, about Heidi the bar owner who gave all her old drunk customers credit for a year.

The word spread like wildfire: “Free Booze at Heidi’s!” and all kinds of new drunks came into the scheme.

On paper, her turnover went ballistic what with every old and young and other drunks coming into the scam; the breweries extended her credit, she lowered her prices against volume sales, the banks lent her a shitload of money to expand the building to include a whorehouse and a Wallmart … happy days!

Until the people that bought her thriving business asked the old drunks to pay their bills at the end of the year and started a credit collapse throughout the little system that shook the walls, I’m telling you!

That’s pretty much what happened recently, but big time all around the world and only a few old drunks really got anything out of it - a year’s worth of free beer!

In the current situation, ‘respectable’ banks loaned money to people who they knew could not pay it back, just like the honorable Heidi.

Now, Henry Ford said that we don’t learn anything from history, so I thought I’d be the first old drunk to have a look and see what I could learn from history, which goes some way back.

I started with laws and rules, beginning with the Ten Commandments, but they are just totally ignored social rules, and went on to Hammurabi’s Code, which made much more sense, written a little later, about one thousand and seven hundred years before Christ through to Tacitus, who wrote ‘The Annals of Rome’ at about the time of Christ, which gave me some perspective.

On the one hand, it’s all about food – production, storage, protection, and distribution, all with a force of arms standing by with fierce looks.

On the other hand, who owns the system that produces, stores, protects, etc., the Daily Bread? The government – in this case, run by Hammurabi?

Hammurabi’s Code is a simple set of rules that makes any interruption of commerce a crime. And commerce then was run on payment of corn. Interruption of commerce meant interruption of corn on the way to Hammurabi’s own table.

Food.

Tacitus is just as interesting in that he was a very dry, factual and non-partisan commentator on what was happening in Italy two thousand years ago, but he reveals an interesting scenario: dual or parallel economies operating symbiotically but without real awareness of each other – one based on the ‘food chain’ part of the extractable resources including people and materials, the other a ‘fiat’ economy based on credit, meaning debt, implying interest (which Rome capped at 5% and banned usury).

General ‘Ike’ Eisenhower warned us of the power of the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, which existed in Roman times in much the same way as today – a separate economy from the ‘real’ economy of general commerce and real estate, which operated aside from the then Military Industrial Complex which was and still is resource-based, taking people and material as needed fundamentally to protect the internal food supply of the nation.

The wealth of all nations depends on many factors, but essentially rests on this parallel economy theory – one resource-based economy taking what it needs from the environment without ‘paying for it’, and another, ‘fiat’ economy dependent on the real resource wealth of the nation in which it resides, protected by the Military Industrial Complex of the time.

The fiat economy is not resource based at all but quite arbitrary and based on fluctuating and equally arbitrary rules of commerce measured in and by the manipulation and accumulation of currency, which is either printed or minted and is created ‘out of thin air’, traditionally representing a base of gold or other ’real’ hard assets that can be quickly converted to tradable currencies or, as the moneylenders realized thousands of years ago … debt.

Like the debt created with Heidi’s extended booze credit.

Hiedi’s ‘credit bubble’ was created out of the thin air of free booze payable a year later (which she certainly knew would not be made, but since she sold the business as soon as she could after creating the bubble, way before the year was up, and left the country, she’s having quite a ball in the Seychelles).

I’m joining her next week for a conference on how to make some coinage out of the current credit crunch – after all, credit is debt and debt is money from the future we can trade up to and including my new ‘free booze’ package called the Credit Default Swap derivative system of leaning on tomorrow’s childrens piggy bank savings … well, not yet, they have to grow up and get jobs and be mortgaged and all, but you have to look ahead in this world.

It’s our own fault, because we are still not learning anything from history.

It does help if you read some of it, though, in case we want to avoid this happening again.

Also, there is nothing wrong with the study of contemporary history: Last week Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor and early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, warned that civil unrest on American soil is a possibility that should not be dismissed.

Brzezinski explained that “the United States is going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve.

“And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America - (The people Heidi sold her business to sold the debt to another bunch who sold it on and then also left the country shortly after she did.)

Brzezinski concludes with this noteworthy remark “…hell, there could even be riots”.)

Things have obviously been bad for the past year, but things are just beginning to get much worse. As economic forecasters predict another two years of decline, the Associated Press reports: “The economy’s downhill slide at the end of last year was…

“To be ready is not”… Ponce