ABBY NORMAL

 "Debt is an ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave driver."

                                                                        Ambrose Bierce

 When this debt binge began in 1982, the profits of financial companies accounted for 7% of all U.S. company profits. At the peak in 2006, they accounted for more than 30% of all U.S. company profits. This is why the money managers own the yachts, not the customers. The banking industry, backed by its sugar daddy the Federal Reserve, has enslaved the most of America in their web of debt. They have sucked the vitality and creativity from the nation through the distribution of easy credit. In the last nine years these whoring bankers went completely mad in their greed induced search for outrageous levels of compensation by granting credit to anyone with a breath and creating fraudulent products to perpetuate ever increasing levels of debt. When this blew up in their faces these banks should have gone bankrupt and many bank executives should have gone to jail. Instead, Dr. John Hussman explains what has happened:

“Rather than following policies that would have allowed for a sustainable recovery, our policy makers opted for a stunningly unethical strategy of making bank bondholders whole with well over a trillion dollars in public funds, watering down accounting rules to allow banks to go quietly insolvent while reporting encouraging “operating profits,” looking beyond the continued shortfall of loan loss reserves in relation to loan defaults, and doing nothing meaningful with regard to foreclosures, whose rates continue to soar and which face a fresh wave later this year and well into 2010 and 2011. These policy responses have more than doubled the U.S. monetary base within a period of months, added a trillion more in outstanding Treasury debt, and virtually assure that the value of those government liabilities will be re-priced in relation to goods and services over the coming decade. A range of different methodologies suggest a doubling in U.S. consumer prices over the coming decade, though with the majority of this pressure occurring 3-4 years out and beyond.”

Sometimes I feel like Dr. Frankenstein pointing out to Igor that we need to fix his hump, when I talk about the huge amount of debt on our backs.

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: You know I'm a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump.
Igor: What hump?

The current amount of debt accumulated by our citizens and government is mind boggling. We are in a filthy mess. But it is about to get worse. A major storm is on the horizon.

 [Froederick and Igor are exhuming a dead criminal]
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: What a filthy job.
Igor: Could be worse.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: How?
Igor: Could be raining.
[I t starts to pour]

The $56 trillion of unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are a debt that must be paid. This is an unfunded $183,000 debt for every man, woman and child living in the country today. The only way to pay the current and future debts is to increase savings dramatically, reduce consumption dramatically, and increase investment in things that will create real wealth. Real energy self sufficiency projects such as nuclear power plants, coal powered plants, wind farms, natural gas pipelines, liquid natural gas facilities, electrical grid upgrades, replacement of crumbling water and sewer pipes, and upgrading of our public transportation and road networks are what is needed. Is this being done? No. We fiddle while Rome burns. Instead, grand healthcare schemes are being dreamed up that will add trillions more to our crushing debt and the government takes over the car industry. This will end no better than a rear end collision with a Ford Pinto.

 The great deniers of our plight assure us that our best and brightest will discover or create some new invention to save the day. Based on the rankings of our 10th graders in math and science, the new discoveries are not likely to occur in this country. We effectively graduate mostly functionally illiterate dullards from our school system every year.

The time has come to accept the bitter medicine of a lower standard of living for the foreseeable future. Saving not spending, will save this country. Until most Americans realize the insidious web of debt that they have been trapped into by the poisonous banking cartel, they will never emancipate themselves from their state of slavery. Who is to blame for this catastrophic state of affairs? We the people are. As citizens, if we do not endeavor to exercise control and discipline over our own spending or government spending, who will? Only we can choose to save rather than consume. Only we can elect officials who will spend our tax dollars responsibly. Only we can bring the banking cartel to its knees by not borrowing and no longer accepting less than 1% on our deposits. The choice is ours

“America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or, at least, we used to.”

                                                                                    Larry Elder