Edgar J. Steele

"The future ain't what it used to be."
--- Yogi Berra

$700 billion to bail out the financial industry! Actually, over $800 billion once they got done "sweetening" the bailout package. That is what the US Congress voted to allow Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to hand over to his Wall Street buddies, with virtually no oversight. And that was just for openers.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury on their own have dispensed hundreds of billions more to financial firms. What's more, the Federal Reserve, which is a private company owned by foreign bankers, refuses to identify to whom it has given the US taxpayer dollars that it has loaned into existence out of thin air (created from debt that will hobble our children and their children).

Billions for Bankers

Literally billions of those taxpayer-funded bailout dollars now are being paid to Wall Street big shots in the form of year-end bonuses, if you can believe it, on top of multi-million-dollar salary and benefits packages. Bonuses ... for failing.

These guys should have been fired years ago, but we allowed them to take full control of America's banks and corporations through illegal payoffs to our elected representatives, who then confirmed them into top government policy-making positions (like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, who two years ago took hundreds of millions in salary and bonus for his position with the Goldman Sachs banking firm).

Nothing for Workers

Meanwhile, the workers of America - the very people who made possible the financial industry that now plunders the heart of the American dream - are facing the bleakest Christmas in memory. Just two days ago, Congress refused to authorize a mere $14 billion in loans to the Big Three automakers. Loans that would have had to be paid back - not hundreds of billions given simply in exchange for worthless securities and equity, as in the case of the financial bailout. Loans secured by the last truly productive, large-scale manufacturing plants and assets in America, manned by the last truly productive factory workers in America.

Billions for bankers - nothing for workers. How typical for what America now has become.

Git a Rope!

It is beyond me why people aren't marching in the streets of Washington, DC, right this minute, torching government office buildings. Or on Wall Street, hauling out those corporate fat cats and stringing them up from lamp posts.

For years, I have predicted that America would crumble under its own financial weight. For years, I have forecast the "balkanization" of America. Never did I dream that it would be so blatant, however. Never did I consider that the people would allow America's governmental and corporate elite so openly to plunder the wealth of our country. This goes well beyond the thievery that Boris Yeltsin engendered in the Soviet Union and which led to its demise.

Billions of dollars have flowed to banks, ostensibly to make loans to American businesses, so that they would hire the unemployed to make things that their newly-hired fellow workers then would buy, thereby jump-starting the productive engine of the American economy. What are bankers doing with those loan proceeds? Acquiring other banks or sending them abroad, to buy other banks to loan to businesses in other countries. Banks also are loaning those funds back to the Federal Reserve for a pittance in interest payments. But it does not appear that any of that money actually is trickling down to the workers.

Twice the Chance of Disaster Today

In the Fifties, it was unusual for Mom to be working, as Dad's salary was enough to support a family. Today, it is necessary that both parents work. Why? Because our government stole well over half the value of the dollar from us in that short time span by printing more dollars than justified by increases in productivity. That is called monetary inflation, which inexorably leads to price inflation. You know - the price inflation that caused the purple 3-cent postage stamp from the Fifties to morph into today's 42-cent first-class stamp!

Now, with unemployment surging past 15%, far above the 6% or 7% to which the government will admit (thank Bill Clinton for that little revision in economic reporting), we learn that losing just half the family income is enough to engender catastrophe on par with Depression I. Twice the workers per family means twice the chance for economic disaster. Half the income simply does not pay the bills, let alone put food on the table.

Just Say Ho

The workers now are tapped out. We can't refinance the house again to pay off the credit cards. If we had an unused home-equity credit line, that now has been closed. We can't charge any more to our credit cards, either - Chase Bank, among others, just this week sent out millions of letters notifying cardholders that credit-card limits have been dropped to just above our current account balances. Talk about a credit squeeze.

And the timing is magnificent in its irony: Just as we were getting desperate enough to max out our credit cards so that the kids might have a little something on Christmas morning this year. We knew we had that credit-card headroom, small as it was, available if all else failed. Well, all else now has failed and the very bankers who are paying themselves multi-million-dollar year-end bonuses from our tax dollars (our kids' tax dollars, actually) have seen to it that all we get for Christmas is the proverbial lump of coal. Just say Ho.

What Will It Take?

What will it take, folks? How long before you figure out that they intend to grind us into the dust and you decide to do something about it? You can't really be blamed for re-electing them, I suppose, as there was nobody but them on the ballots. But, you can be blamed for not doing what people in other countries are doing right now: rioting and demanding the heads of the corporate, financial and government elite.

Yes We Can't

I was willing to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt immediately after the election, but now he has announced his cabinet positions and economic team. They are straight out of the Clinton and Zionist playbook and already are promising more of the same. Obama surrounds himself with the very people who created America's problems, yet points to himself and says that he, himself, is the "change" he promised.

Sorry, Barack, it pains me to turn on you before you even take office, but your actions are speaking too loudly for me to hear you anymore. Yes we can't, in other words.

Incidentally, I have looked into all the evidence and reviewed the hoo-ha over Obama's birth certificate and the Constitutional meaning of the phrase requiring that a President be a "natural-born citizen" of the US and concluded that Obama truly does not qualify to be President. That is my seasoned and professional legal opinion, too, not just that of some de jure Constitutional sea lawyer.

Barack Obama quite simply is not a "natural-born citizen" of America. Can you believe it? The Supremes just announced that they would not consider the issue, either. This fact, alone, fatally compromises Obama and removes any possibility that he might "go off the reservation" in the manner that got JFK killed when he went up against the Federal Reserve, the CIA, Israel and the American (Jewish) mob.

Regardless, still I thank God that McCain and Palin will not be taking over next month. I have had quite enough of nutballs who claim that God wants America to kill Arabs.

We've Been Had

America is finished. The American dream is dead.

We've been had, folks. Most of those aware enough to be reading these words know that, however. It's the others, the ones who won't get off the couch, turn off the TV and start thinking about what really is going on, who are the real problem. To them I say what the old codger on the porch in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre said: "Yer already dead. Yer jist too stoopid to know it!"

New America. An idea whose time has come.

-ed

-###-

Copyright © 2008 Edgar J. Steele. Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate both the written and audio version of this Nickel Rant™ among private individuals and groups, post on all Internet sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications. The audio version of this Nickel Rant may also be freely used in its entirety by for-profit broadcasting entities, but is not to be included in any recorded format which then is sold to others. The audio version may be rebroadcast, either live or archived on the Internet, either copied or linked directly to my web site, profit and nonprofit alike, so long as it is used in its entirety. In fact, I encourage any and all radio hosts to use it freely. Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.

On-Line link to this rant in HTML format: http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/rants/billions.htm